The language of the garage door

The first thing I noticed about the garage doors was the colour. So I photographed a series of garage doors along a back lane in a Victorian area of Milton Keynes.

These back lanes are the old alleyways. Night soil would have been collected here in early mornings. Coal deliveries would have been made. Kids would have played. This would have been their territory at weekends, evenings, early mornings, safe from the unpredictabilities of the roads. These days - these car-heavy days - 1960s garages provide an abrupt end to the long, thin, Victorian gardens. Their access doors face into the alleyway on both sides. You walk through an avenue of them, and I photographed as I walked.

Many of the garage doors are grey or white. Strangely, the spray can wielders seem respectful about this - my photos above and below show their black and white text - no clashing colours against that cool grey! They've created a sort of monotone art on grey canvas. Or a school jotter, writ large.

In the photo below perhaps red was used at an earlier point? Then along comes someone with white paint and very precisely writes over that disturbing, attention-seeking colour, rather as you would ferociously write over a word in editing to obscure what you didn't want. Here, the white KRetz removes the red of heat or outburst, tempering that flare with a determined hand.

Writing over someone else's words - or leaving a respectful space around them - is perhaps telling me about a relationship between the taggers. Do they recognise each other? Do they judge each other? Is refraining from overwriting another name the equivalence of social tolerance? A sort of politeness? 'Don't trouble me, and I won't trouble you'? Is overwriting the equivalent of 'in your face, on your patch'?

But I liked the way that in each of these pictures, the spray canners used the lines of the metal as if they are guide lines on a page - the door becomes a public account book or a school exercise book. An act which we think of as transgressive suddenly becomes normal - I am looking at an student book, writ large.

And these examples I see are written at eye-height to me, which suggests something too about the height of the writer. I can imagine them standing at the garage-blackboard. Pupil becomes teacher?

But in the photo below, I see a different approach ...maybe the vertical lines of this door provided the writer with a creative liberation? Freedom of expression, generous sizing, the sort of expansive arm movement you just can't do in more disciplined environments.

Also colour! A daring purple poised against that grey. If I were judging this as visual composition, I think the (one? two? three?) taggers have done okay in their collaborative piece. The whole has a sort of movement, flow, and balance, don't you think?

This next one also offered the liberation of vertical lines. I don't know what J.S.A. stands for. (Probably not Job Seeker's Allowance.) See that s which becomes an f, writ to the right in black? It looks disturbingly how one of my own children draws their letter f. An over-generous cursive, too florid for traditional hand. A writer experimenting how curvy a letter f can become before it morphs into an s. Here, not on material to be discarded, but with a semi-permanence.

I can imagine someone passing down this same alleyway, five years from now with a wry smile. I was the person who wrote that, five years ago. It is a marker, an identity of someone who stays anonymous; a moment which we can see, through peeling paint and fading tone, ages, yet stays the same.

The next door I couldn't figure out. It said, here is a history. Did someone paint the whole door crudely in grey, then several hands reply in white? Maybe it is a visual argument or contested space - the owner painting out the original tags; the spray canners coming back; the erasers having another go; the taggers returning?

But not only garage doors bear this history of multiple hands at multiple times. The door below, attached to the side of an old bakery, now a takeaway pizza house, looks like a service door or fire exit, not often used. I still see a restrained colour choice. Someone chose grey paint here, so I guess they would need this non-grey background. It would be a perfect find!

Strangely, some doors are totally untouched. (By now, they look invitingly like blank canvas.)

I liked this next one. It is a sort of anti-art, like a thrown out bleugh against the world.

But then what a riot! Blue, green, yellow, red, black, white. If it started life as a word, I cannot read it. Can you?

But does this all make for language landscapes? I'm not sure. I'd argue that these words, albeit ones I can't understand, have as much visual impact, if not greater, than the street instructions, information signs, and local directions I'm familiar with.

And here are words with meanings to someone. They're words which are public. Not so public that they face the main street, but public to pedestrians using the alleyways - dog walkers, children, people accessing their houses from the back doors, not the front.

Are these texts in more than one language? Perhaps if I count tags, abbreviations and bleugh as a written language of the street, then it's an alternative written language to the one I normally use.

And how spray-can language communicates between practitioners, I can only guess. What it feels like, too, to take a public canvas, the thrilling illegitimacy of touching another's property, the dialogue I can begin with strangers. Maybe I should get myself a can of red, find a grey canvas, and find out?