The Faith of Graffiti records a New York at the moment when writing on walls was becoming legible as an art form rather than merely an act of trespass. Jon Naar’s photographs, first associated with the 1974 publication and reissued by It Books in 2009, attend to graffiti as a public language embedded in the city: marks claim space, announce identity, and alter the terms by which streets are seen. The book’s subject is therefore not only graffiti itself, but the social and visual tensions gathered around it—identity, property, authorship, and urban life.

Its defining structure is a dialogue between image and argument. Naar’s photographs are paired with Norman Mailer’s 1974 essay, while the volume’s contributors also include Mervyn Kurlansky. Mailer approaches the phenomenon through an essayistic and cultural lens; Naar’s work supplies the encounters, surfaces, and urban evidence through which that question can be experienced. The combination resists treating graffiti as decorative background or isolated spectacle. Instead, words and pictures meet around the contested status of the city wall: canvas, territory, record, and public address.

The 2009 It Books publication is described as expanded with thirty-two pages of additional photographs and an afterword in which Naar reflects on the project and the meaning it acquired over the intervening decades. That expanded conception matters. It places the original period of observation in conversation with its later reception, allowing the book to be read both as a document of New York street culture and as a meditation on how images, styles, and acts of marking persist in cultural memory.

For a serious photobook collector, The Faith of Graffiti deserves attention because its importance lies in the sustained collaboration of photographic observation and literary interpretation. It belongs to the history of street photography, but also to the history of how graffiti entered books, criticism, and the broader account of modern urban culture. The 2009 hardcover, ISBN 9780061965401, offers that layered encounter in a substantial 128-page volume: a record of a city’s walls, and of the changing ideas those walls made visible.