Despite his loyalty to the New England Patriots my friend Rick is a good dude. I met him living in Richmond, VA and even though he left way before I did he is one of the few RVA kids I still keep in touch with.  He moved to Denver, CO where he started working for a domain hosting company.  I have nearly 40 domains still registered with them even though he doesn’t work there anymore and they jacked up the prices on me. Since he left Domain Site he has been doing a lot of SEO stuff and freelance work and he is helping me with another site I run.  He is the person who got me to actually use Twitter. (Follow him! – Follow me!) He does a lot of web work, but his best project has to be Unseen Denver.

Unseen Denver is a street art website but it has a more poetic feel to it.  It’s about finding things that most people are too busy to notice. It’s not just about big graffiti murals and throw ups. It’s not about just names written on walls.  It’s about accidental art, people just writing their thoughts on walls, it’s signs and notes and things just found on the street hidden unless you are looking for them.  Yes there are tags and yes there are throw ups on there, but it’s not the focus.  And the best part is that it is all user generated. People just send in image of the art they find while walking around the city.

I have been documenting similar stuff myself for years. I even had a few of those pics show up on the Converse blog a while back. When I saw what he had done with Unseen Denver I approached him about bringing the site to NYC.  He told me he had been thinking about it but never had anyone in place to help him promote it and find photographers.  Well, he just found someone.

Say hello to Unseen NYC.

I sent Rick about 100 of my NYC street art pictures and Rick set up a really, really simple blog. He is going to post one picture of mine a day until we get other people involved. I posted about it on Facebook the other day and got a bunch of response so I think this project might take off.  Once people start submitting photos Rick is going to do a serious design for the site and we are going to start writing featured posts and making the site more like Unseen Denver.

So the point of all this is… WE NEED YOUR HELP! If you are walking around in NYC and you see some street art you like… take a photo. You could shoot it with a $5000 large format camera or you could shoot it with your camera phone. It doesn’t matter.  Just get that art and send it in! This should be a lot of fun if we get a ton of people involved.

HOW TO SUBMIT!

Please send your photos to UnseenNYC@trypnotik.com. Please include:

1. Your Twitter handle (if you have one)
2. Your name / web site (if you don’t use twitter)
3. Headline
4. Neighborhood where the picture was taken (if you don’t know what neighborhood, send the cross-streets)
5. Your Photo

If someones face is in the photo, you must have their permission before you send it in.

We do not wish to incriminate our local artists, so please do not ever send information identifying outlaw artists.

You can also submit by posting pictures to our Facebook page or if you take a cell phone picture you can just upload it to Twitter and put the hashtag #UnseenNYC in the Tweet.

So in conclusion: Check out UnseenNYC. Send us pictures. And let’s make an awesome website together representing the secret art of greatest city in the world. And I’ll leave you with a few of my shots…

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