Book Review: Banksy Captured Vol. 2 by Steve Lazarides
If Banksy Captured Vol. 1 was the birth of rebellion, Banksy Captured Vol. 2 is its adolescence, swaggering, ambitious, and slightly hung-over from success.
When the Street Became a Stage
Lazarides turns his lens outward: from Bristol’s underpasses to Piccadilly’s skyline, Los Angeles’ warehouses, and even the prim halls of the Tate. The scale has changed, but the spirit remains pure anarchy wrapped in precision.
These are the years when Banksy went from ghost to global myth, from walls and whispers to headlines and Hollywood. Yet, through Lazarides’ gritty narration and faultless timing, what emerges isn’t celebrity it’s creation under siege.
Steve Lazarides – Banksy Captured Vol. 1 & Vol. 2
The Age of Ad land and Anarchy
The book opens on a different battlefield. By the late 1990s, the urban landscape had been conscripted into advertising; brands were using graffiti’s own weapons to sell soft drinks and denim. In response, Banksy and his co-conspirators turned guerrilla marketing back on itself. They weren’t selling anything except dissent.
Lazarides’ photographs frame this moment with cinematic clarity. You see the art not as object but as incident, blurred bus in motion, a passer-by half turned, the brief electric spark between illegal act and public apathy. It’s an art form before the age of algorithmic outrage; graffiti still risked handcuffs, not hashtags.
Steve Lazarides – How To Paint Graffiti & Get Away With It – available framed / unframed
From the Back Streets to Hollywood
The stories here spiral into legend. The helium-filled Girl with Balloon over Piccadilly Circus is both a stunt and a parable, a literal symbol of hope caught between street and sky before being flattened by a double-decker bus. It’s British irony at its finest, half miracle, half mishap.
Then comes Barely Legal in Los Angeles, the show that catapulted Banksy from cult status to tabloid myth. Lazarides recounts it like a heist film; permits, customs, elephants, and Angelina Jolie with Brad Pitt. What might have been a freak circus turns into a perfect storm of timing, talent, and total madness. It is, as he admits, “from the gutter to the stars” and you believe him.
Elsewhere, in Crude Oils, the pair transform a tiny West London gallery into a rat-infested theatre of the absurd, live rodents, charity-shop masterpieces, and the faint smell of plague. Lazarides hates every minute of it, which of course makes it brilliant.
And then the trophies: Designated Riot Area stencilled on Nelson’s Column, the stuffed stoner-rat (Banksus Millitus Rattus) smuggled into the Natural History Museum, and the Tate Britain intervention where a fake Constable was hung so convincingly that staff left it there for hours. Each episode is both comedy and commentary, a collision between institution and insubordination.
Steve Lazarides – Unforgettable You- available framed / unframed
The Heart of the Storm
Lazarides’ prose remains dry, funny, and bruised by hindsight. He writes as a man who didn’t realise he was documenting history until the dust settled. He’s honest about the contradictions, Banksy’s fame fuelling the very commodification he once mocked, yet never cynical. These chapters are love letters to risk; odes to a time before permits replaced panic.
If Vol. 1 was rebellion’s blueprint, Vol. 2 is its empire chaotic, glamorous, and faintly tragic.
Raw, hilarious, and tender in the unlikeliest places, Banksy Captured Vol. 2 proves Lazarides isn’t just the man who watched it happen he’s the one who made sure we’d never forget what it looked like.
Steve Lazarides – Banksy Captured Vol. 1 & Vol. 2
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