It was Friday May 2nd, and I was stood on a crammed district line train on my way to work; I glanced at someone else's freebie newspaper, which had a photograph of a stacked car, and a headline about the graffiti artist, Banksy. Apparently, somewhere in Lambeth, there was to be a secret unveiling, of a new piece by him, as part of a 3 day graffiti art festival. The festival was to be a stencil event, meaning that no free-form / tagging was allowed, only prepared cut stencil's could be used. This sounded interesting to me, because it meant that people had to spend time and effort, thinking about what they wanted to paint; which is likely to result in some talented, and original artwork, as opposed to urban eyesores.

On previous occasion's I've set out to capture street art, last year my cousin Fergus and I attempted to shoot space invader mosaic's, around London. It's quite an interesting thing to go and shoot. I managed to find out the exact location, of the festival on Saturday morning, after a quick google search, after all, it'd just been made public that morning. The following day, I dragged my mate Mark Leamy down to Leake Street, just underneath Waterloo station and the old eurostar terminal with me. Mark was lugging my tripod for me, and I struggled along with both my digital and film SLR bodies, and a couple of lenses and flash / ringflash adaptor. As usual, such an array of equipment draws attention and quite a few people asked us questions as to whom we were shooting for?

After 20mins queuing we got into the tunnel...

Inside the tunnel, the lighting was very poor, and it presented quite a challenge. On my film camera, I had Fuji Provia 400 film loaded, and used my 580ex flash and ringflash, to try and light my subjects adequately. Mark was acting as my packhorse, and holding one of my camera's, and or the tripod whilst I was messing around in my zone.

It was a good atmosphere and fun to be there, and quite a unique environment. People who've not encountered graffiti before, may associate it with petit crime and urban decay, and probably don't see any merits to it. However, in this setting, it was clear that the full array of people in attendance were intriqued and enjoying themselves, we certainly were.

I had promised my mother that I'd make it back to her house for a family lunch, so was pushed for time, and only had about 1hr 30mins in total in the tunnel. Clearly this wasn't going to be enough, as so far, we'd only been about 100m, barely a quarter of the distance. I decided that instead of rushing my shoot and trying to capture everything, that I'd have to come back tomorrow, and finish off. Bank holiday Monday, was to be the last official day of the festival, and I wasn't going to miss out, before they either boarded up, the tunnel again or jetwashed it off. I arrived at 10am on my own, and already the queue was very long.

I had to carry all of the equipment and tripod this time, I had no camera mule unfortunately. I spent 2hrs this time, and got through 3 rolls of film.