Ryan Greenberg

One of my favorite parts of walking through Chilean cities was the eclectic street art and graffiti. Especially in Valparaiso and the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago, areas brimming with color, I thought graffiti added to the streets’ quirkiness. Graffiti is often characterized by its free-form, unplanned, random expression, but many of the examples I saw were a kind of internal contradiction: stenciled graffiti—spray paint confined by plastic templates.

Some of the specimins I found were so entirely whimsical or strange that it was hard not to be charmed by them. Here are three of my favorites:

Men on pipes and tightropes This piece has probably the best placement of any I’ve seen.

An international outlaw. So, uh, where is he?

I love you umbrellas. I’m not sure why I like this one so much, but there’s something charming about the non sequitur replacement of “you” with a picture of an umbrella.

You can check out the rest of the graffiti photos I took over at Flickr (or in a slideshow!) Much of the graffiti expresses political messages, some of which may be particularly offensive to Americans. But I figure that if you’re not offended or shocked on a regular basis, then you’re living an insular life and you don’t really know what people around the world think. That said, take these photos with a grain of salt.