From 1972 to 1973, Gordon MaAa-Clark took over fifteen hundred photographs of graffiti in New York City. These pictures are some of the earliest documentation of an emerging art form, and are an under-recognized body of work from Matta-Clark—an artist who used the city’s crumbling infrastructure to reveal the social and political implications of architecture and urban design.

This publicaLon features every frame from every roll of film Matta-Clark shot, organized according to the sequence of contact sheets in the artist’s archive. Taken together, these pictures demonstrate...