Welcome to BSA Images of the Week.

This week’s collection leans toward graffiti—city writers rekindling a romance with old styles, tracing our urban aesthetic lineage with fresh hands, new eyes, and scribes. Beyond that, the crime stats continue their long downward drift, despite some corporate outlets insisting our city is in daily chaos, as if Bedlam had moved in. Immigrants are valued members of New York’s sense of community and multi-culture, as ever, but a strangely well-funded machine would have you think differently- if they could. NYC is far more youthful, open-hearted, and innovative than that kind of thinking can imagine.

National heaviness seeps into the local air: relentless headlines, instability abroad, inhumanity and warmaking, higher costs, service cuts to some of the most in need, attacks on institutions—and on your search for sanity. You can feel it rumbling like the subway underneath: a slow, grinding disquiet, the weight of evident inequalities, the steady drip of absurdity and distraction.

Maybe that’s why the streets speak in heightened tones: sometimes glorious, other times surreal, opaque, saccharine, macabre. Rage simmers alongside wistful nostalgia. Escapism too. As old certainties dissolve, strange new forms begin to emerge. The atmosphere feels charged—thick with tension, possibility, change.

Everyone agrees New York is hot this summer—oppressively so—until, suddenly, there’s a breeze, a clear sky, and you exhale. Let’s go for a walk. How much of what is seen is real? How much is perception? How much is projection? Hard to say. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s all part of the picture.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week including Couch, D30, Dopamine, Homesick, Jappy Agoncillo, Kam S. Art, KEG, Nekst (tribute), RatchiNYC, Sefu, SMLZ, Sower Kerd, Wild West, and Zoot.