At the beginning of street art and graffiti, on into the 1950s and 60s, there were mainly individual, initially unknown pioneers, before the movement opened up around 1980 to a worldwide circle of interested people. It was not just a question of the value of these works created by anonymous artists. There was also the assertion that they were not in fact art at all. But that discussion was had already been given a nudge forward in 1949, when members of the 'affichist' group officially declared illegal tear-offs to be art.

The first person to document graffiti and street art was Brassaï. From as early as 1933 (!) onwards, he photographed illegally scratched and painted graffiti in Paris and exhibited the pictures to a small, select public. By 1960, under his own steam, Brassaï had managed to get some of those photos of anonymous scratched graffiti shown in museums and printed in illustrated and mass-circulation  magazines. Around 1960, the popular French poet Jacques Prévert gave Brassaï's photos a wider circulation on the covers of his books, and wrote one-liners in the style of slogan graffiti.

As from the mid-1960s, independently on both sides of the Atlantic, the creators of street art and graffiti became less anonymous on the street. This was a time in which artists such as the jazz poet Ted Joans in New York and Guy Debord in Paris laid down retrospective claims to being the authors of well known anonymous graffiti from the 1950s.