Photo from Ben Kramp's Instagram account
Ben Kramp was was alarmed by the hundreds of broken hydrants in Detroit and wanted to raise awareness and money to help, Motor City Muckraker reports.
So the 23-year-old graphic artist, who learned his skills at the Detroit Center for Creative Arts in Midtown, created posters of striking images of hydrants marked with yellow out-of-service discs and began circulating them on campus, Steve Neavling of Motor City Muckraker.
The posters and stickers were part of his senior thesis earlier this year at CCS, Neavling reports. Though he circulated them, he says he wasn't the one who posted them on light poles, bridges and abandoned buildings in the city.
“I put out free posters on campus, and I’ve been handing them out since then,” said Kramp, whose grandfather was a captain in the fire department. “Whatever people do after that is up to them.”
Well, Motor City Muckraker reports:
What Kramp didn’t expect was for Detroit police to threaten him with arrest under Mayor Mike Duggan’s graffiti crackdown. On Tuesday, an officer knocked on his mother’s door in Farmington Hills, saying they wanted to question him about his images, some of which ended up on light poles, bridges and abandoned buildings in the Motor City.
Kramp created a website DetroitHydrants.com to raise awareness of the problem and he's been selling stickers and posters to raise money for the firefighters.
