The unintentional beauty of graffiti removal

"I love graffiti. My eye is always drawn to it. It leaps out at me from train cars, overpass shadows, and from walls that are usually the drab colors of forgetting. Graffiti is the art of remembering, of claiming space, of an artist’s colorful signature on a dreary world. I look for the impossible to decipher letters, the elegant cartooning, the bold color. I’m enamored with the graphic black; the way the paint splatters or fades. I love graffiti. But I love buff even more. When graffiti is removed, it is 'buffed'. It gets painted over. As in, 'Man! That tag I did last night was buffed this morning'. Before I knew the correct term, I called a buff 'paint over', and in 2009 I started taking and collecting photographs of graffiti that had been painted over. Over the last three years I’ve amassed almost two hundred pictures of beautiful buffed pieces (...)" (Mattie Kannard)