Painting
published by Retort Magazine, on June 17th, 2010In 2002 I wrote to Banksy asking for a copy of his self published book Existencilism – this was before he attained global notoriety, so he responded. I published my review in Retort Magazine and it remained in the top 10 most visited pages on the site for at least 6 years. Here is the original review in the National Library of Australia digital archive. When he sent me his books he also sent me a CD of high resolution (50+mb) TIFF format photographs of his work that he had taken himself. Today, while going through an old archive box of Retort submissions/posters etc I found the disc. Here they are, early (circa 2001-02) Banksy originals, taken by the artist himself.
As an interesting side-note, also in 2002, or perhaps 2003, a disgruntled photographer from Jamaica sent me a bunch of photographs of Banksy putting up stencils. There are close up full face photographs, and today I also found the CD with those photographs, which naturally I will sell to the highest bidder (or not – *evil laugh*).
Click on photos to enlarge.
