EM: What made you guys both decide to photograph and document the graffiti scene? What in particular  interested you about it? We started photographing graffiti in the 90's because in east village there was a lot of graffiti. My husband ran into friend from graffiti and he asked if he could photograph some of his artwork which happened to be by the track side. This beautiful graffiti made us want to track out more,it became an addiction. Last free forms of art, they needed photographers to document their work. Some artists would put their numbers on the wall, graffiti artists knew others so it spiraled from there. NY graffiti has a worldwide audience and is the mecca of graffiti, it is literally the birthplaces of graffiti and a lot of graffiti artists come up to us and thank us for the work that we do. We have a website you can go to, it's Jamesandkarlamurray.com EM: You guys have published three best-selling books on the graffiti scene, Miami Graffiti, Broken Windows and Burning New York. When putting together those books, did you guys aim at getting a specific message out to readers through the photography? What did you want to get across to viewers through the selected photos? Graffiti is to an artistic form. Art goes into these large murals, which is one of our favorite things to photograph. The graffiti artists appreciated that we weren’t just taking the public graffiti but we were putting ourselves at risk in order to take these photos and going to the locations they paint at with them. EM: Of the different locations you photographed at, what was or were your favorite and why? One of our favorites are the illegal productions on the train tracks in the Bronx. They got rid of the graffiti, it doesn’t exist anymore but we got a lot of great photos from the FXcrew and FC. Broken Windows has a lot of these photographs, it was reprinted with additional photos and we expanded it as well. GGG has a lot of old school graffiti artists that I like. I especially like Lady Pink, a female artist who's work is really amazing and I respect all that she has done. She's definitely an inspiration. EM: Who is your favorite graffiti artist? Everyone has their own style and their own sense of their art. We couldn’t say w ehave a favorite. But as far as for women, Lady Pink for her style and because there are not as many female graffiti artists, she's very brave for going out there and doing what she does. EM: You guys are curating the art exhibition this December Graffiti Gone Global. Give us a glimpse of what kind of audience this event brings in. People came from all over the world. There were little kids and families there to grandmothers. We also had a lot of people that came to the event who supported in the hip hop world including other graffiti artists and music artists. EM: Do you think graffiti should be commercialized and integrated into the mainstream media? Graffiti by nature is a free art form and just the idea of bringing it into a gallery changes its way. For some, it might help an artist’s career but that isn’t what graffiti is about. Once you start getting into commercialism, that’s never what it was all about. Its core is still an art form on the streets. EM: In your book, Store Front, you guys take photographs of old stores and shops in New York's neighborhoods. Why stores and shops? Graffiti led us to take these old mom and pop stores and by looking for graffiti spots. These old stores are disappearing and we started looking at letters of store fronts and realized that they are like graffiti as well. we approached it same as graffiti I think graffiti will always be around. You can’t stop it, if you push it down someplace it will put up somewhere else as the more the city tries to erase it, the more the artists will put it up somewhere else. The artists have such a desire to put up their art they cant be stopped. The styles have changed in different neighborhoods and different areas because of different influences and Artists have a lot more tools that they can work with now. EM: You guys have a dog named Tabasco, that’s cute. What kind of dog is he? Does he/she come with you Haha yeah, he's a pitbull and he comes with us everywhere. He actually allowed us to go places that we wouldn’t be able to go into places late at night we wouldn’t have been able to go into for Store Front and Tabasco took a lot of photos on location but we kept those photos for us.