The goal of this site is the same as the original magazine: to showcase local graffiti — mainly from Espoo, Helsinki, and nearby areas. That said, we won’t follow this rule too strictly. But we want to emphasize this: not all original magazine material will appear on this site. There are several reasons:
- some photos were borrowed and returned long ago
- others were damaged during the magazine production process
- many images have faded or lost quality over the decades
- and we tried to avoid too much repetition with publications still available
We’ve restored what we could, but there’s a limit to what Photoshop can fix. That’s why a lot of the material here isn’t exactly shiny or perfect — but it still captures the vibe of the era. And hey, compared to the magazines they’re in full color! We plan to include previously unpublished photos from the same time period to fill in the gaps.
Other publications
Some of the material featuring HRC was later republished in 2016 in the book HRC – Osa Espoolaisuutta vuodesta 1990 and in 2021 in its English edition HRC – Graffiti from Espoo, Finland since 1990. Since the book is still available, we won’t republish all of that content here — just selected parts. If you’re into old-school Finnish graffiti, we highly recommend the book. Some of the material from Radioactive has also appeared in Helsinki Graffiti (1998), which many consider to be the Finnish Graffiti Bible. That book was sold out in an instant, but luckily in 2025 2nd, an expanded edition was released and this one is still in stock (buy here)!
Perintö (2018), another book with a huge amount of photos, includes a portion of the material we originally published — and tons more as well, so the book is definitely worth checking out. It focuses mainly on the Helsinki area, but naturally many writers from Espoo painted in Helsinki too. The editor of Perintö scanned some of our material using a professional scanner, which allows us to present certain photos here in relatively good quality.
There were two black and white graffiti magazine which were published partially the same time as Radioactive: Berlin and High Voltage. Since we knew these people as well as had mutual friends around the globe, we naturally received and took photos ourselves of the same material. So, most likely some of the stuff seen here can be familiar from these two publications, especially from the 1996-1998 era.