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taggers demonstrate their skills in order to establish a winner (Rahn 20). These artistic battles became a type of cultural warfare among teenagers who had few other means of inexpensive entertainment. In the case of graffiti, the desires to be the best or most prolific writer were often synonymous, and the subway trains, billboards, and other stationary objects in the urban landscape of New York became the can- vas for the ambitious. Almost by accident the work of taggers was discovered by two pho- tojournalists in the 1980s. Martha Cooper and Harry Chalfant began photographing the work of graffiti artists as it appeared on subway cars in the New York City transit system. In Chalfant’s Soho loft, peo- ple would leave messages on his answering machine of when and where to find freshly painted trains. The pair compiled their shots of the subway cars and shopped it around publishers in New York. The public opinion regarding subway writing, as it was first known, was divided over whether it was art or vandalism. The book was not picked up by any American publisher. Instead, finding interest over- seas, it quickly became a classic, showcasing the range of creativity and talent used by subway writers on the trains that ran routes in the elevated parts of the subway in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Graffiti came into international circulation with the publication of Subway Art (Cooper and Chalfant 124). Both Cooper and Chalfant became hip hop photojournalists as well as producers of films and contributors to numerous books about graffiti, as well as b-boying. In Chicago, Illinois, graffiti became a racially inclusive avenue for white teens wanting to participate in hip hop culture, as Visual, a rap- per in the underground Chicago hip hop scene, explains: ... the funny thing is that here in Chicago, it was the graffiti scene that got a lot of the white kids involved and accepted. Because that’s what they did and they were good at it and they were down. They were climbing ... running around and tagging on cop cars and punching other crews in the face. So they did the same [as] every other graf writer did, so it was like I don’t give a s**t if you’re white, black or what. You’re down with my crew and that’s how it went down. (Harkness, unpublished data) Creativity, self-expression, and ability to define one’s identity were important values shared by both graffiti artists and hip hop dancers. xviii Introduction