When people go on holidays, they like to see the sights, or shop, or lie on a beach, or dine in nice restaurants. Me? I like to hunt for graffiti. While I was in Victoria, I did a lot of walking and found graffiti everywhere. Tags. Bombs. Walls. Stencils. Even dust on bus shelters. Some of it was commercial graffiti–commissioned by the owners of the walls. Some of it wasn’t. It’s usually easy to tell the difference. See my flickr account for a large selection of things I found, mostly in Victoria, except for the auto racks which I found in a marshaling yard in New Westminster. The HYPE piece featured here (click the image to download a larger version) is a composite of four photos I took in a parking lot off Fisgard Street in downtown Victoria. You can see a tag for the KWOTA crew which I also saw this morning on a wall in downtown Toronto. I guess they get around.One morning, while I was photographing along Esquimalt Road, a man said to me: “They should bring back the lash for graffiti artists.” I have difficulty understanding the hostility many people bear for people who decorate walls. The lash? For spray paint? There doesn’t seem to be any proportionality between the punishment and the crime. In Toronto, Rob Ford appealed to this general hostility during his mayoralty campaign by promising to clean up the streets. Now, months after Ford launched his war on graffiti, citizens and community organizations are scrabbling after a dwindling pot of city funding. The arts in Toronto are acutely vulnerable. I see a connection between Rob Ford’s hostility towards graffiti and what is quickly revealing itself as his rabid philistinism. He just doesn’t like art of any sort. And that’s the curious thing about the man who would bring back the lash for graffiti artists. He still called them artists.