The past few years, I’ve been having a love affair of sorts with street art the world round. One of my favorites is graffiti girl.
Here’s a personal favorite. I snapped this shot of graffiti girl in 2010 as I walked along the River Guadalquivir to see AC/DC in concert at the Olympic Stadium on the Isla de La Cartuja, Sevilla, Spain.
The night before, a man from Northern Ireland slipped into my purse a general admission ticket to the 57,000-person sold-out show.
He did so after I suggested he sell the extra ticket or give it away to an AC/DC diehard. I want you to have it, he said. I politely declined. Several times, in fact. And yet. At my hotel later that night, I found the ticket in my handbag. Thing was, the ticket was general admission. If I went to the concert, changes were good that I would never see my gift giver.
If I went. Screw that. I was going.
The street art in this shot of graffiti girl resonated — resonates — because I felt a bit like a matryoshka doll at the time, human object inside a human object, the objects, the external and internal, in many ways similar but not at all the same. Tank, skirt, sandals, hair knotted, I passed groups of concertgoers, teen cliques, couples with children in tow, lovers wrapped around each other as they strolled. I walked five miles to get to that concert, walked by myself, attended the concert solo. People bounded past the ticket takers by the hundreds. No security.
There is no loneliness like foreign loneliness.
I did the only thing I could do, let intense Andalusian heat break me open. Maybe I was ready to show what was inside, but maybe not.
I wish I could remember the man’s name.
