We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2025. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. We’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street. Happy Holidays, Everyone!

Praise the labor of painting and painters: the technical mastery, the arduous strategic planning, the bodily toll. We usually encounter graffiti, street art, and murals only after they are complete, detached from—and largely unaware of—the conditions that produced them.

Yet for the painter, the city is often an active adversary: hostile architecture, weather, chain-link barriers, gravity, the harness dangling from a roofline. Graffiti writers and some street artists elevate their work by placing it where it should not be possible, making difficulty itself part of the statement, part of the accomplishment. Muralists, across centuries, have paid for scale with their bodies, remaining suspended for hours at a time, contorting themselves to reach a surface or achieve an effect. What we admire as an image is often a record of endurance.

This understanding of art as sustained labor is hardly new. Auguste Rodin, as recalled by Rainer Maria Rilke, reduced artistic success to a discipline of repetition and persistence: “You must work, always work” (Il faut travailler—toujours travailler).

Michelangelo, writing while painting the vault of the Sistine Chapel, was less stoic about the cost. He described a body warped by duration and strain, the romance of genius replaced by physical degradation:

I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy…
My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s
pointing at heaven…
my brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings.

Seen this way, large-scale painting is not merely an act of vision but one of submission—to time, gravity, and repetition. The finished surface may appear effortless, but it carries within it the residue of labor, risk, and bodily negotiation.