The Beautiful Walls: Photographic Elevations of Street Art in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Paris

This companion volume to filmmaker/photographer Yust's exhibition Street Art at UCLA's Fowler Museum highlights "the aesthetics of defacement": graffiti; poster-covered fences; tagged signage, buses, and railroad tracks. On the painted walls and pavements of Crenshaw Boulevard, Coachella, the Gare St. Lazare, and the Berlin Wall, Yust finds expressions of individuality, social and political commentary, inadvertently beautiful decay, and outsider art%E2%80%94as in the case of Leonard Knight, who transformed the land surrounding Slab City, in the Colorado Desert of California, using straw, adobe, and paint. Each of the book's panels is pulled outward from a detail image; opening them becomes an adventure that allows the viewer to experience Yust's painstaking process. He often takes more than 200 digital overlapping images to capture murals, a practice he calls "finding luck." Yust's images and cityscapes reward careful and repeated viewing; readers will find something new each time they unfold these panels. (Oct.)