Nicole Sanches

Obviously, photography is an art form. As is graffiti. So what’s photography of graffiti?

Vancouver-based artist Nicole Sanches has been posting photos of discovered street art from Seattle and Vancouver on Flickr since August 2005. This month, I spoke to her about appropriation, documentation, and yes, her own art as well. Is she stealing? She says she’s just trying to give street art a longer shelf life.

“I put a disclaimer right on the profile page saying none of it is mine,” she says. “I’m just documenting it because it’s so temporal, you know? Because the rain washes it off, or it gets scraped off.” The said disclaimer reads, “None of the street art/ graffiti is of my doing. I just take photos of the things that catch my eye on the street.”

So what about giving the prime artists their due? Sanches says after she started taking the photos she did some detective work and quickly found out who many of them were. “They definitely want to keep their anonymity,” she says. Apparently only one artist had any problem with her posting his work, and he just requested that she ask his permission next time. So what about her own work? Sanches graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1998 and her pieces are decidedly different from the street art she shoots. At the moment, she is primarily creating 1 x 1 ft. dioramas featuring super-tiny model figures, pieces, and found objects, like, um, severed doll legs, among other things.
“This one day I was in Edmonton and I had just stepped out of my friends car and I looked down at the street and there was this Barbie doll leg, but it was just the knee,” she explains. “The other parts had been chewed off by some animal. So I picked it up and I was like, ‘wow, this is fantastic’. And of course my friends were like, ‘get that out of my car,’ but I eventually used it about a year later in a diorama called Accident.” Sanches likes playing with size and proportion in her work, but says dioramas aren’t her only medium. “I’m a conceptual artist, so whatever idea I have, I try to present it in the best way that it can be expressed,” she says. “Dioramas, right now, are working for me.”
Nicole Sanches Website

-Jen Selk
Jen Selk’s Website