Fred Brathwaite, more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American visual artist, filmmaker, and hip hop pioneer. He is considered one of the architects of the street art movement. Freddy emerged in New York's downtown underground creative scene in the late 1970s as a graffiti artist. He was the bridge between the burgeoning uptown rap scene and the downtown No Wave art scene. He was immortalized in 1981 when Debbie Harry rapped on the Blondie song "Rapture" that "Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly." In the late 1980s, Freddy became the first host of the groundbreaking hip-hop music video show Yo! MTV Raps.
ZEPHYR, born Andrew Witten, is a graffiti artist, lecturer and author from New York City. He began writing graffiti in 1975 using the name "Zephyr" in 1977. He is considered a graffiti "elder", who along with Futura 2000, Blade, PHASE 2, CASH, Lady Pink and TAKI 183 invented styles and standards which are still in use.
Henry Chalfant is an American photographer and videographer most notable for his work on graffiti, breakdance, and hip hop culture.
Glen Ellis Friedman is an American photographer and artist. He became known for his activities within rebellious skateboarding and music cultures. Photographing artists Fugazi, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, Minor Threat, Misfits, Bad Brains, Beastie Boys, Suicidal Tendencies, Slayer, Run-DMC, KRS-One, and Public Enemy, as well as classic skateboarding originators Tony Alva, Jay Adams, Alan Gelfand, Duane Peters, and Stacy Peralta, among others.
Martha Cooper is an American photojournalist. She worked as a staff photographer for the New York Post during the 1970s. She is best known for documenting the New York City graffiti scene of the 1970s and 1980s.
Ernie Paniccioli is an American photographer of hip hop culture who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was inducted into the Hip Hop Hall of Fame in 2014.
Albert Watson OBE is a Scottish fashion, celebrity and art photographer. He has shot over 100 covers of Vogue and 40 covers of Rolling Stone magazine since the mid-1970s, and has created major advertising campaigns for clients such as Prada, Chanel and Levis. Watson has also taken some well-known photographs, from the portrait of Steve Jobs that appeared on the cover of his biography, a photo of Alfred Hitchcock holding a plucked goose, and a portrait of a nude Kate Moss taken on her 19th birthday.
Patti Astor was an American performer who was a key actress in New York City underground films of the 1970s, and the East Village art scene of the 1980s, and involved in the early popularizing of hip hop. She co-founded the instrumental contemporary art gallery, Fun Gallery.
Ricky Powell was an American photographer who documented popular culture including hip hop, punk rock, graffiti, and pop art. His photographs have been featured in The New York Times, the New York Post, the Daily News, The Village Voice, TIME, Newsweek, VIBE, The Source, Rolling Stone, among other publications. His photographs included candid portraits of artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Madonna, in addition to many other popular culture artists and other common people. His photographs were included in the books The Rap Photography of Ricky Powell! (1998), The Rickford Files: Classic New York Photographs (2000), Frozade Moments: Classic Street Photography of Ricky Powell (2004), and Public Access: Ricky Powell Photographs (2005) and were exhibited both domestically and internationally.
Roger Erickson is an American filmmaker and photographer. He is the first African American to photograph a cover of Vogue magazine featuring Paulina Rubio on the March 2003 cover of Vogue En Español and Lily Aldridge on the August 2003 cover of Vogue México y Latinoamérica.
Bill Adler is an American music journalist and critic. Since the late 1960s, he has worked in the music business in a variety of capacities, including as a record store clerk, radio disc jockey, critic, publicist, biographer, record label executive, documentary filmmaker, museum consultant, art gallerist, curator, and archivist. He is known best for his tenure as director of publicity at Def Jam Recordings (1984–1990), the period of his career to which the critic Robert Christgau was referring when he described Adler as a "legendary publicist".
Cey Adams is an American visual artist, graphic designer and author. He was the founding creative director of Def Jam Recordings and is known for his work with Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Jay-Z, and Mary J. Blige. He has been described as "legendary" for his work in hip-hop graphic design.
Gösta "Gus" Peterson, née Gösta Reinhold Pettersson was a Swedish-American photographer whose fashion photographs were widely published in the editorial pages of magazines including Elle, Esquire, EssenceHarper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Marie Claire, and The New York Times, from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. In the 1960s, Bea Feitler, the former Art Director for Harper’s Bazaar, Ms., and Rolling Stone said, "The most interesting fashion pages now – the ones that say the most about our times – are Gösta Peterson’s for Mademoiselle." The photographer Duane Michals called him, "underrated."
Drago is an independent international publishing house of contemporary art based in Rome, Italy. The company specialises in street and urban art and has published the works of street photographers, street artists and graffiti writers from around the world. It is frequently involved in exhibitions of contemporary art and acts as the official publisher for various galleries, museums and institutions.
Cathleen Naundorf is a contemporary artist and fine art photographer. She lives in Paris and London.
Brian Cross, better known as B+, is an Irish photographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. He is a co-founder of Mochilla, a film and music production company. He predominantly photographed the Los Angeles' hip hop scene in the 1990s as well as helped create album art for a number of artists including Q-Tip, Eazy-E, Damian Marley, DJ Shadow, and J Dilla.
Michael Benabib is an American portrait photographer, known for his portraits of David Bowie, Tupac Shakur, Sean Combs, and Keith Richards among others. Notable portrait photography of public figures include Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz and Loretta Lynch. His work has appeared in publications including Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, Rolling Stone, Vibe, ESPN magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NPR and Newsweek. His work was included to photography collections on display by The Smithsonian and MoMa.
Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop is a 2018 photography book created and written by Vikki Tobak and ongoing exhibition series. The volume features contact prints from analog photography sessions of hip hop artists during roughly forty-years, from the beginnings of the genre in the late 1970s until the late 2000s.
Barron Claiborne is an American photographer and cinematographer who grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He began taking photographs at the age of ten. After moving to New York in 1989 he began assisting established photographers such as; Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Saint Claire Born, and Richard Numeroff. His photographic mentor, was Gordon Parks.
Adama Delphine Fawundu is a Sierra Leonean-American multi-disciplinary photographer and visual artist promoting African culture and heritage, a co-founder and author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora – a journal and book representing female photographers of African descent. Her works have been presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide. She uses multiple mediums to create works with themes about identity, utopia, decolonization, and stories of the past, present and future. She is a Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.
