Banksy's former manager and close friend has spoken about the artist's unknown identity and how seriously he takes it.
Steve Lazarides, who, like the artist, is also from Bristol, photographed, worked with, and managed Banksy from 1997 to 2008, spending more time with him than most.
It's fair to say that Banksy is a British icon, recently coming back into the spotlight with some street art of spray-painted animals popping up all over London.
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“Banksy will never retire. I’ve told him countless times to do so. He needs to enjoy his life,” Lazarides claimed.
Now 55, the photographer revealed that he met the artist as a graffiti lover in the late nineties, and was sent to photograph the him in Bristol, eventually hitting it off and exchanging numbers.
He recalled: “It was funny and he had balls, I was fully sold and I would do anything to help this kid. After the shoot we had a few beers... And then a few more.”
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They started to sell paintings out the back of a car, going from £5 a print up to £5 million a canvas, with Lazarides' help, he claimed, adding: “Did I think it could get that big? Absolutely not. We were just two kids having fun.”
He even opened up on the artist's most famous work, 'Girl with Balloon', and theorised that it could be about a past love, but is not a fan of the work and labelled it as 'the housewife's favourite'.
Holding it up in a promotional video, he said: “Shown a thousand times around the world. Rumour is that (girl) is his ex-bird and he painted this when he was upset she dumped him, which sounds about right.”
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Banksy's former manager then opened up on the difficulty of keeping his identity under wraps, as AI has even given its best shot at creating his face.
Though Lazarides didn't want to say too much, he explained: “The anonymity was a big thing, it started off with self-preservation in Bristol. He didn’t want to get caught, he didn’t want to go to jail, fair enough.
"And then as the years went by and it went on for longer, I think that the anonymity became quite a disease. Everyone has this figure in their mind, they have a folk hero, and it looks different in everybody’s mind. He’s never really got to enjoy the fame he got,” he admitted.
In fact, the Bristolian artist would use burner phones and pay-as-you-go handsets to communicate, something Lazarides had to get for him.
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“Every couple of weeks, I’ll have to go out and buy two new burner phones with cash and not giving any address. My shops became further outside Central London because I didn’t want to keep going back to the same one. I ended up with a room full,” the former manager admitted.
He also shared that the highlight of their working relationship was when they managed to sneak a taxidermied rat in a glass-fronted box into the exhibition, unknowingly.
Since cutting ties with the artist, Lazarides has set up his own online auction and gallery, which includes original stencils by the artist, phones, notes, and plans for projects, in addition to shoes worn by Banksy, with his name inscribed.
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But as well as this, the photographer aims to move away from the artist, explaining: “I want to get on with my life as a photographer, this is what I was doing very well before the Banksy mania. It’s time to let the Banksy escapades go.”
However, some critics claim that he is selling private drawings that were never intended to be seen by the public.
But in a film to promote the auction, Lazarides claimed: “We never really got on, we were different slices of life. We both recognised we could have a great working relationship, and we did,” despite the jovial early stories he shared.
Joshua Nair