Book Cover Image of Jamel Shabazz: Albums by Jamel Shabazz

Jamel Shabazz: Albums
by Jamel Shabazz

    Publication Date: Mar 28, 2023
    List Price: $50.00
    Format: Hardcover, 240 pages
    Classification: Nonfiction
    ISBN13: 9783969990957
    Imprint: Steidl
    Publisher: Steidl
    Parent Company: Steidl

    Description of Jamel Shabazz: Albums by Jamel Shabazz

    Photo albums from the archives of the iconic chronicler of New York’s 1980s rap, hip-hop and Black culture

    The influential Brooklyn-based photographer Jamel Shabazz has been making portraits of New Yorkers for more than 40 years, creating an archive of cultural shifts and struggles across the city. His portraits of different communities underscore the street as a space for self-presentation, whether through fashion or pose. In every instance Shabazz aims, in his words, to represent individuals and communities with ""honor and dignity."" This book—awarded the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize—presents, for the first time, Shabazz’s work from the 1970s to ’90s as it exists in his archive: small prints thematically grouped and sequenced in traditional family photo albums that function as portable portfolios.


    Shabazz began making portraits in the mid-1970s in Brooklyn, Queens, the West Village and Harlem. His camera was also at his side while working as an officer at Rikers Island in the 1980s, where he took portraits of inmates. This book features selections from over a dozen albums, many previously unseen, and includes his earliest photographs as well as images taken inside Rikers Island, all accompanied by essays that situate Shabazz’s work within the broader history of photography.