Our relationship with graffiti is nothing if not complicated. On the one hand, it is a criminal offence, one that can result in prison time. On the other, works by street artists like Banksy fetch huge sums of money at the world's most exclusive auction houses.
But it hasn't always been this way. For much of human history, leaving one's mark was a common, accepted occurrence. From the boasts of Roman gladiators to the prayer of medieval priests, graffiti was part of the everyday world. So how did we come to view this unruly and hard-to-define media with such mistrust and ambiguity?
The answer lies in the 18th century. This was the age of revolutions in which graffiti underwent its own radical transformation to become something feared, reviled and legislated against. Over the course of the century, extraordinary ordinary folk – from political prisoners to sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets and the artisans of the industrial revolution – turned to the surfaces around them to record their presence at some of the past's biggest (and smallest) moments. The results, sliced into dank castle cells and splashed across palace frontages, scratched in alleyways and hidden in plain sight
