Carol Murphy talks to acclaimed documentarian Doug Pray about his new feature film Infamy, an exploration of graffiti art premiering in this year's Resfest tour.

Toomer, Earsnot, Jase, Claw, NM, Saber and the Graffiti Guerilla. Look closely at the walls, doorways, pillar boxes, street furniture, train carriages, and kerbs of America and these artists will make their presence felt through the years of tags and blasts that consume the urban cityscape. This year's Resfest includes the premiere of Doug Pray's melancholy look at the urban art of the graffiti artist. Pray is the director of feature length documentaries Scratch (2001) about the world of hip hop DJs and Hype! (1996) which explores the emergence of the Seattle rock music scene; however it was a major in Sociology at Colorado College that marked out his desire to investigate movements particularly the working mechanisms of subcultures.

Carol: Can you describe your journey from studying sociology to making documentaries?

Doug: The sociology part of it is when you are in college you have to come up with a major and I did sociology. But I guess I have always been interested in movements and what groups of people do. I think maybe because I was the youngest of four boys in the era of the 60s, I got a really good first-hand experience of how a movement of people works, and maybe that made me more predisposed to really getting into different music movements. Then when I needed to study a major I just decided to study why people do what they do. So there is a connection – I am definitely doing films about subcultures.

But specifically subcultures that penetrate and almost take over the mainstream – for instance, hip hop is almost ubiquitous now.

Yeah, although with that one it was with people who you don't always know. Another theme in the films that I have done is that they are all underdogs. I'm not making films about big stars, and I haven't done any biographies of big stars. The only films that I get excited about are films about total underdogs – not that they don't want fame, I mean all these graffiti writers want fame – but I guess I really enjoy being with people who are out struggling and doing art.

A short version of the article is printed in Film Ireland 107. For a full version see here.