Alex Fakso: Heavy Metal

by Jamel Shabazz (Photographer), Alex Fakso (Photographer), Giovanna Calvenzi (Introduction)

In Heavy Metal , the Italian photographer Alex Fakso brings us behind the scenes of the secretive and low-down-glamorous world of European graffiti art, documenting the daily (and nightly) lives of that continent's most celebrated street artists--spraycans in hand. Fakso was allowed unprecedented access to this normally guarded underground culture, from Milan, to London, Berlin, Barcelona and beyond, allowing him to produce an electrifying body of work that conveys, on every page, the sense of an urgent covert mission. Fakso produced these photographs during the twilight hours, documenting each artist's unique tactics, movements and sense of personal each photograph conveys the compelling sense of risk and adventure with which the artist approaches his work, whether entering into a shadowy train yard or negotiating a high fence to do so. In keeping with the tradition of the great urban documentarians Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant and Bruce Davidson, who recorded New York's subway graffiti in the 1970s and 1980s, Fakso puts European graffiti, and its practitioners, on the map. This exhilarating, long-overdue collection represents the new generation of emerging European street artists, and is an essential record of European urban culture in our time.

164 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Jamel Shabazz (1960) is best known for his iconic photographs of New York City during the 1980s. A documentary, fashion, and street photographer, he has authored 12 monographs and contributed to over three dozen other photography related books. His photographs have been exhibited worldwide and his work is housed within the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Fashion Institute of Technology, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Getty Museum.

Over the years, Shabazz has instructed young students at the Studio Museum in Harlem’s “Expanding the Walls” project, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture “Teen Curator’s” program, and the Bronx Museum’s “Teen Council.” He is also the 2018 recipient of the Gordon Parks award for excellence in the arts and humanitarianism and the 2022 awardee of the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl book prize. Jamel is also a member of the photo collective Kamoinge, and a board member of En Foco, another photo collective. His goal as an artist is to contribute to the preservation of world history and culture.