“Tr: To Drink and To Penetrate Jubilantly,” Jean Faucheur

Every time I turn a corner into a bookstore, at least a dozen new graffiti books threaten my faith in this form. Ostensibly “art books,” these publications simply flood shelves with terrible photographs of mediocre wheatpaper posters and wall-scrawls as empty as the cans that were wasted on them. Art book? No — and it undercuts the value of graffitti to give these paperweights that pretense.

Then there are the gems, few and far between. Graffiti Paris, available this month from Abrams, is not exactly a gem, however. It suffers from the kind of documentary, head-on photography that leaves the graphic in the frame but little else, decontextualizing the work from the neighborhood that produced it. Especially in Paris, where geography permeates identity, that context is key.

But Graffiti Paris is still one of the better books out there. Paris is full of strong, living, fighting and politicized graffiti and Fabienne Grévy, the art historian and photographer who created Graffiti Paris, has a great eye for picking the quality pieces off a wall overrun by quantity.

As Grévy notes in the introduction, Graffiti Paris includes photographs taken over the last 15 years. The project’s priority was to preserve a record of Paris street art from the 1990s and late-80s, street art that will soon be worn away. In other words, the point here was never to make an “art book” exactly and, as a record of some of the best graffiti to grace The City of Lights in the past decade, Graffiti Paris is really rather good!