Passing through moving in and getting away with it: Gordon Matta-Clark, New York city graffiti

From 1972 to 1973, Gordon Matta-Clark took over fifteen hundred photographs of graffiti in New York City. These pictures are some of the earliest documentation of an emerging art form, and are an under-recognized body of work from Matta-Clark—an artist who used the city’s crumbling infrastructure to reveal the social and political implications of architecture and urban design.

This publication features every frame from every roll of film Matta-Clark shot, organized according to the sequence of contact sheets in the artist’s archive. Taken together, these pictures demonstrate Matta-Clark’s obsession with the graffiti that had exploded across the city’s walls, subways, and buses, and show him growing bolder as he moved from photographing on the streets and subway platforms, to trespassing in outer borough train yards. While he was out on these documentary missions, Matta-Clark also photographed abandoned architecture, infrastructure, and the social life of the city. Those pictures are included as well, as they show the relationship between graffiti and themes that are more commonly associated with the artist’s work.

An essay by Antonio Sergio Bessa and a text by Jonathan Lethem accompany the photographs.

Gordon Matta-Clark

Other Means, 2025

23 X 18 cm, 1008 pages