DANIEL LUENGO’S INTRIGUING BAGS

For illegal graffiti sessions, bags have always played a crucial role when transporting paint without generated suspicion. Something as common as a disposable plastic bag wouldn’t seem to be the most predictable way to hide aerosol cans. In that sense, a bag becomes a metonymic metaphor for graffiti and may even reflect a part of the writers’ lives who carry them.

The photographer Daniel Luengo focused on this element for a series of pictures that he posted recently on Instagram. A bunch of aesthetically naive snapshots are in perfect unison with the sloppy appearance of these sacks that are mostly filled with MTN Mega and MTN Madmaxxx.

Daniel Luengo explains, “the idea arose one day when I was joking with some friends about writers who always where a football jersey and use an El Corte Inglés bag; a typical cliche amongst Spanish train painters.” He took the photographs of his own and his friends’ bags before painting. Apparently, many of them come from shopping trips to supermarkets or from large paint acquisitions.

Going unnoticed is’t the only reason for using them. The fact that they are comfortable to use while painting and disposable is another incentive for using them, since once the paint is used up you can forget about carrying anything around for the rest of the night.

So, bags have become a codified symbol for illegal graffiti which only writers are able to understand, and they don’t just hide paint on their interior – they also hide the pieces and tags of their anonymous authors whose identity we can only begin to imagine•