Everywhere you look

Graffiti covers nearly all of Berlin's buildings. Grafitti writers will tag any and every building as high as the arm can reach and the paint will spray. But why? Today I went to meet Gideon at a Graffiti battle, but he never showed. I did sit and watch for a while, but I'm still curious about what compels them to do it. I mean, why spray paint on the side of a building when you can easily do the same on paper or canvas?

Without Gideon there I felt like an outsider. Well, I am an outsider. Many of them didn't want to be photographed so I only got to shoot stealthily from one side. The way it works is the mediator (the guy with the black head covering) chooses a word or what would be called a "tag." Then, the next two competitors on that list in the middle come to each side and write the tag five different times. When both are finished the crowd votes. This is just round one. With each round comes eliminations and the task becomes harder. The tags become more intricate, and the last man standing wins.

Before I made my way to Kruezberg for the battle, I went back to the East Side Gallery to get some better pictures of the wall. Again I was confronted with the enormity of the history, but also the beauty of the gallery that's left. It, like the rest of the city, is covered in all these glorious paintings that are essentially grafitti. It's like Berliners protested the wall by painting on it, and so now it comes natural to them to do the same to the rest of the city. Sometimes in protest and sometimes just for fun. I can't help but think that the wall is at least indirectly responsible for the brilliant street culture of Berlin. It influenced the way Berliners expressed themselves by being the canvas for their frustration, and continues to be responsible for many of the problems Berlin faces today. According to the New York Times, Berlin's unemployment rate is at 17 percent and the city is in debt $77 billion. Reunification and rebuilding takes so much time and so much money, but as Berlin Mayor Klaus Woweriet famously put it, "Berlin is poor but sexy."

This spectator enjoyed the best in the house while the rest of us sat on hard benches.












and the wall...












A man admires the section of the wall at the East Side Gallery.