Buff or Delete Elfo? The Last One For ’25, the First One For ’26

Buff or Delete Elfo? The Last One For ’25, the First One For ’26

Elfo isn’t wrong, as they like to say these days.

This photograph shows the phrase “You can remove graffiti with Photoshop” sprayed in plain white aerosol lettering on a wall in the countryside.

Elfo. Somewhere in Italy. (photo © Elfo)

Elfo isn’t wrong—but he isn’t quite right either. The statement hinges on where graffiti is most often encountered today: on brick and concrete, or on a glowing fluorescent rectangle in your hand. Conceptually, this is not a new kind of irony, but the choice of text and its placement sharpen the point. In a misty, ivy-covered scene like this, an Italian cow would have more jurisdiction than Photoshop.

The work quietly acknowledges a shift in authorship and erasure—from paint removers and municipal cleanups to crop tools, filters, and deletion. Yet here, far from screens and scrolls, the sentence sits stubbornly in the landscape, where digital tools have no authority at all. The result is less a joke than a measured contradiction, asking whether graffiti now lives more durably on walls—or in pixels.

Elfo. Somewhere in Italy. (photo © Elfo)
Elfo. Somewhere in Italy. (photo © Elfo)
Elfo. Somewhere in Italy. (photo © Elfo)
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Photos of BSA 2025 # 1

Photos of BSA 2025 # 1


Street art doesn’t only regale walls, it often reflects us, flaws and all. Call it protest or simply commentary, this piece landed in 2025 right in the middle of the contradiction of our moment. Artist Clown Soldier simplifies the scene for effect: masked ICE agents attacking Liberty, roughing up a powerful symbol of freedom at Ellis Island, the same gateway generations of immigrants passed through to seek a new life and to build this country from the ground up. Now we are asking ourselves, what has changed, and how did it happen?

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

~ from the plaque on the Statue of Liberty

Clown Soldier. Manhattan, NY. December 2025. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

To all those who consult the Bible:

Matthew 25:35–40
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me… Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

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Photos of BSA 2025 # 2

Photos of BSA 2025 # 2


Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece reads as a farragoed ruckus of illustration—a continuous line bent into scenes, characters, and visual kiniptions—carrying the brashness and tenacity of illegal under-bridge graffiti while remaining unbound by aerosol means and ‘style’ rules.

Because of its material logic and the artist’s methods, this work by Reed Bmore operates in real-time, framing and reframing its surroundings. Light shifts, traffic moves, and bodies work their way through the streets below. The installation redraws itself again and again, becoming something different from one moment to the next—an illustration in motion that insists the street itself is part of the composition.

Reed Bmore. You’ll see their work in Wynwood, Brooklyn, Philly, and, of course, Baltimore. Wynwood, Miami. November 2025. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Photos of BSA 2025 # 3

Photos of BSA 2025 # 3

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The most successful murals are created within the context of a community. Too often, street art festivals operate with little regard for the neighbors they affect—the residents, families, and sacred spaces that surround the work. What is framed as a “gift” can instead resemble a form of cultural imperialism, delivered by self-appointed benefactors.

In Prague this fall, however, we saw a contemporary approach applied to the portrait of a culturally significant figure, and the result felt measured, grounded, and in balance with its setting. Here is a modernist profile of Milada Horáková, who was a Czech democratic politician and resistance fighter executed in a 1950 Stalinist show trial. In Prague she stands as a powerful cultural symbol of moral courage, civic resistance, and the enduring trauma of communist repression, commemorated through memorials, street names, and public remembrance.

At the base of the graphically interrupted portrait is a quote from her, translated as “Walk through the world with your eyes open and listen not only to your pain and concerns, but also to the pains, concerns and desires of others.”

Milada Horáková, by Toy Box.

Toy Box. In collaboration with Urban Pictus. A portrait of Milada Horakova marking the 75th anniversary of her judicial murder. Prague, Czech Republic. November 2025. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Happy New Year 2026 From BSA

Happy New Year 2026 From BSA

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!


Okay let’s do this! The future is unwritten. Get out your marker.

Tiremarks left in a parking lot during the first snowstorm of 2025 in NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Photos of BSA 2025 # 4

Photos of BSA 2025 # 4

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!


Caught it! She’s a pioneer photographer and supporter of the scene, and Martha Cooper continues to inspire street artists everywhere. Here’s a portrait from Swed Oner in Bushwick, Brooklyn, this fall.

Swed Oner. Portrait of Martha Cooper for The Bushwick Collective. November 2025. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Photos of BSA 2025 # 5

Photos of BSA 2025 # 5

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!


The kinetic chaos of this feathered flurry under a Berlin train track this fall is heightened by the memory of a threat from the woman feeding these pigeons, and her devotion to their needs. Not only did she refuse to let us pass by when she was feeding the wild winged wonders, but she also threatened to seize the camera! Don’t worry, sis, no faces!

Next time you are on a park bench or waiting for the bus, spend a few minutes observing pigeons; historically significant to civilizations dating back thousands of years, intelligent, scrappy, hard-working, just trying to get along like the rest of us. This interaction on this day in Berlin taught us to pay closer attention.

A woman with a red bag and pigeons. Berlin, November 2025. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Photos of BSA 2025 # 6

Photos of BSA 2025 # 6

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!


It’s not all doom and gloom, but sometimes you may get that impression. In New York—like everywhere else—economic stress, global chaos, and general social burnout are just kind of… ever present. And yet we yearn to celebrate the New Year! Let’s do it.

The only fundamental mistake is assuming you’re alone in these gloomy feelings. You’re not. Say hi. Check in. Be decent. It won’t save the world, but it does mess with the algorithm.

RIP GLOOM. Brooklyn, NY. November 2025. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Photos of BSA 2025 # 7

Photos of BSA 2025 # 7

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!


Somewhere along the King’s Road, punk hardened into a classic ‘look’ – or dictionary of ‘looks’. Stripped of its insurgent force by decades of commercial smoothing, anarchy in the UK became as defiant as a Disney cartoon. Yet on a brisk late-summer evening this year, a red-mohawked youth stomped to his own march toward modernity on a Brooklyn street. Provocative or a unique stab at self-expression, this lad appeared to have a presence and resolve. Alternatively, he could have been late to the film set as an extra in a 1970s drama for Netflix.

Punk. Brooklyn, NY. October 2025. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Photos of BSA 2025 # 8

Photos of BSA 2025 # 8

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!


“When I watch people holding their smartphones, I often ask myself: are they holding their phones because they want to, or because they have to?”

This year, conceptual street artist Leon Reid gave that question physical form with a sculptural image of digital servitude that felt unsettlingly precise. The work struck a nerve with BSA readers, prompting a strong and immediate response. Reid’s question cuts to the core of behaviors that increasingly appear compulsory rather than chosen—habitual, addictive, and largely unexamined—and raises the issue of how deeply these technologies are reshaping society. It also invites a more complicated question: how many systems that began as entertainment or convenience will soon become unavoidable, even mandatory?

Leon Reid. “Of A Free Will”. In collaboration with Novo Collective. Brooklyn, NY. October 2025. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Photos of BSA 2025 # 9

Photos of BSA 2025 # 9

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!


This was the year that rappelling from high places tipped the balance in New York graffiti. No matter the style or anti-style, vertically executed pieces seemed to drop from above.

WERDS. DZEL. MANIK. DUSTO. RIOT. Manhattan, NY, June 2025. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Merry Christmas 2025 From BSA

Merry Christmas 2025 From BSA


Thanks to the BSA family and friends everywhere who share their camaraderie, creativity, and support for our work. Wherever you are in the world, we wish you a Merry Christmas!

Little Haiti, Miami. December 2025. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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