Polaroid of French Street Art

The first image (1982) depicts French graffiti artist “Blek le Rat” (born Xavier Prou) utilizing a stencil and spray paint in order to quickly paint rats on a wall in Avignon, France. The second image (1985) is a polaroid of one of his finished pieces, done in Paris.

 Being described as the ‘father of stencil graffiti,’ Prou pioneered this form of street art as a way to quickly reproduce a recognizable image many times. This technique is used by street and graffiti artists today to achieve sharper lines and to quickly place the same design in many places. It is especially popular with graffiti artists who “tag” the places that they paint with symbols or a name, in the same manner that his rats showed the places where he had been present.