Welcome!
This website is all about bathroom graffiti. From the summer of 2007 through 2008, I traveled the United States documenting the best, most meaningful scribbles I could find.
Why Bathrooms?
“Why doodles specific to bathrooms,” you might ask.
Anonymity exists in the stall. Sharpies, pens, pencils, crayons, and other markers make very little noise. This takes the responsibility off the author, encouraging truth. For example, how many people questioning the facts of 9/11 would actually voice their questions and claim ownership to them?
The call of nature is a private, intimate act with oneself. Our culture reflects this: have you ever seen an American film where anyone goes to the bathroom? Taking a dump is a hush-hush thing, and so is public defacement.
These conditions create amazing forums of expression, hundreds of them, in every city across the country. A well scribbled-upon lavatory is a slice of our culture, values, and political mindset, capturing a moment in context. It is a reflection of the real country, the people of the
Unfortunately, these meaningful canvases rarely last long. Restaurants, bars, cafes, libraries, and colleges paint over them. Can we really blame them? Business is business. For this reason, this website exists.
I personally selected this content. In most public bathrooms, the vast majority of graffiti consists of vulgarities, gang tags, and other such meaningless fluff (“Joe was here”, etc). You will not find this here. When choosing what to trace, only graffiti striking me as aesthetically appealing, meaningful, or humorous made my cut. These discriminatory categories are subjective, but I think you will largely agree with my choices.
Roughin' It/The Experience (are you experienced? :p)
The journey had its rocks in the road. Spending countless hours in bathrooms, day after day, got a little crazy.
The public bathroom itself has its own repulsing flavor (especially the seedy public bathroom – the one most frequented by graffiti). It is a tight quarter with no sunshine. It smells bad. Various excrements may be on the floor and walls. Chemical cleaning products used in excess permeate the sinuses like tear gas. Ventilation is non-existent.
Sometimes I traced in such a demonic pit (I call them gold mines) for an hour or more. After bumping into various sticky substances and keeping the hardened mucous from touching my tracing paper, I came out looking like a lunatic hollering at the moon: sweaty, wide-eyed, and colored with a smeared mixture of perspiration and pens.
And that was lucky. An uninterrupted hour is a rarity. Usually, there are drunk or highly-caffeinated customers, pounding on the door like a pack of angry gorillas. Once when tracing with a girlfriend, upon our exit after ignoring thirty minutes of angry primate behavior, we got a standing round-of-applause from the whole room (and if they only knew what we were up to…).
Access to the women’s bathroom came about as a process. At first, I simply entered and did my thing. On the third or fourth entry, a bar tender kicked me out (fuck the black-haired Mohawk punk at Sancho’s
How I Documented the Graffiti
First I'd find the good stuff. I liked this particular scribble: "I create myself" (found at Toad, a wonderful bar and hub for traveling acoustic musicians located in Cambridge, MA). I tape up tracing paper and then trace it.
I always use the closest match I can find to what was originally used by the scribbler. Usually I get an exact match.
Finally, I scan the tracings in, remove all the background in photoshop. Thus, I have taken the image "off the wall" for easy viewing (bathrooms are frequently low lighting, cramped places that make horrible photographs).
Enjoy my personally-selected collection!