Book Review: Banksy Captured Vol. 1 by Steve Lazarides
A Love Letter to Rebellion
“My love of photography was borne from my love of graffiti…” with this line, Steve Lazarides doesn’t so much open a memoir as crack open a time capsule. Banksy Captured Vol. 1 is less a polished art book and more a cinematic contact sheet of chaos, friendship, and cultural mutation.
Steve Lazarides – How To Paint Graffiti & Get Away With It – available framed / unframed
The Eye Before the Storm
Every great cultural movement has its accidental archivist, for the birth of 21st-century street art, it was Steve Lazarides, Banksy’s friend, driver, fixer, photographer, and reluctant myth-builder. Banksy Captured Vol. 1 is his visual confession: not a coffee-table celebration, but a brilliant memoir told in pictures.
Before the galleries, before the auctions, before the anonymity became a brand, there was Bristol, rain-soaked, raw, and fiercely creative. Lazarides’ love of photography, he tells us, “was borne from a love of graffiti.” Too unskilled to spray himself, he picked up a camera instead, becoming the chronicler of a generation painting without permission. He documents a world of night buses, underpasses, and adolescent bravado: kids trying to own a wall before the police arrived.
Steve Lazarides – St. Werburgh- available framed / unframed
The Birth of an Icon
The first meeting between Lazarides and Banksy feels almost mythic in retrospect. It’s 1997 by the Bristol docks: Banksy in his scruffy anonymity, Steve with a camera borrowed from Sleaze Nation. The photographer is allowed only to shoot the back of his subject’s head. Even then, secrecy is gospel. What began as one night’s assignment spiralled into a decade-long collaboration that would alter both their lives and the trajectory of contemporary art.
What makes Vol. 1 so intoxicating is its sense of accidental prophecy. Every frame carries the weight of future legend: the artist painting under bridges, hanging on fences, stencilling cows, orchestrating absurdist spectacles with livestock and spray cans. There’s comedy with them chasing cattle through the mud like characters in a Benny Hill reel, and there’s grit: the smell of aerosol, the scrape of concrete, the thrill of trespass.
Steve Lazarides – St. Werburgh- available framed / unframed
The Street as Studio
Lazarides’ eye is unfailingly cinematic. His photographs aren’t just records of art being made; they are art in themselves. Each image situates Banksy’s interventions in their proper context, the chaos of the city. A random pedestrian, a passing bus, a brick wall half-lit by sodium glow, all of it matters.
The chapters move from Bristol’s Barton Hill to London’s Rivington Street and Shoreditch, to the makeshift studio where a generation redefined rebellion. In these pages, we see the birth of Turf War, the rise of Santa’s Ghetto, and the first glimmers of the imagery that would soon dominate art history books: the Balloon Girl, the Flower Thrower, the wry slogans turning protest into poetry.
Steve Lazarides – Balloon Fight (Flight)- available framed / unframed
Santa’s Ghetto and the Spirit of Anti-Commercialism
The Santa’s Ghetto chapters are pure gold. The DIY anti-gallery in Shoreditch that birthed £250 canvases now worth over a million each. The upstairs of the Dragon Bar, the rank toilets, the chemically enhanced creative ferment- it’s the antithesis of gallery white cubes, yet ironically the beginnings of everything that would later hang there.
Lazarides recalls lugging armfuls of prints from the office to the bar “worth half a million quid a trip at today’s rates” with the rueful humour of a man who once sold the future for beer money. These anecdotes crackle, a reminder that genius rarely smells like roses.
Steve Lazarides – Streets of Rage- available framed / unframed
The Drinker, the Kidnap, and the Madness of Value
Few stories better illustrate the absurdity of art-world capitalism than The Drinker saga, a 12-foot bronze prank that’s stolen, ransomed, stolen again, and eventually sold. Lazarides’ retelling captures the surreal dance between authenticity, ownership, and ego that defines the contemporary art market.
Steve Lazarides – Inebriated Wisdom- available framed / unframed
The Man and the Myth
Lazarides refuses to canonise his subject. His tone is equal parts affection and exasperation. Banksy is painted as genius and nuisance, visionary and prankster, a man who could transform a wall into philosophy, then vanish into the night. Their partnership, by turns comic and combustible, reads like a modern-day Don Quixote: one paints the dream, the other drives the getaway van.
Yet beneath the swagger, there’s melancholy. The book captures a lost age, before social media, before digital cameras, before street art became a business model. “If there had been camera phones,” Steve muses, “this book wouldn’t be possible.”
There’s an honesty to Lazarides’ eye that feels journalistic and devotional all at once. He never flatters Banksy; he frames him. The writing oscillates between pub-story hilarity and melancholic self-awareness, the tone of a man both proud and haunted by the empire he helped build, only to be exiled from it.
Steve Lazarides – Photo Op – available framed / unframed
Legacy in Black and White
Beyond its anecdotes, Banksy Captured Vol. 1 serves as a visual time capsule of late-90s Britain. You can smell the damp concrete, the pub smoke, the tension between art and arrest. The portraits are extraordinary, raw, funny, human. In one frame, Banksy crouches beside a cow; in another, he stands dwarfed by a wall that seems to absorb him entirely. Lazarides’ composition always returns to the same theme: scale. One small act of defiance against the enormity of the city.
Steve Lazarides – Banksy Captured Vol. 1 & Vol. 2
This isn’t glossy nostalgia. It’s a living document of a revolution shot in real time the art of the elusive artist made visible.
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