Exposición · On view through November 13, 2026

212

Lisa Leone's exhibition "212" shows her earliest work, intimate, unguarded images of hip-hop's first generation, shot on the streets of New York, a city still finding its shape.

Leone started photographing in 1982 as a student at the High School of Art & Design, alongside classmates who would become some of hip-hop's earliest graffiti writers and dancers. Shooting on a Leica M6 and M4-P, quiet, unobtrusive cameras that let her stay close without ever getting in the way, she captured artists without studio polish: just the artist, the street, and the texture of a city she saw as beautiful even at its most broken. More than thirty years later, these images remain a rare, close look at a culture and a community before either fully knew what they were becoming.

"When I first began photographing, I was at the High School of Art & Design. It was 1982, and hip hop wasn’t yet a thing. NYC was deeply scarred, cash-strapped, and suffering from severe financial strain. The city was visually broke: decaying infrastructure, subways covered in graffiti. It was the peak of the “bad old days”. Yet, I saw the city as beautiful, rich with texture- like an Aaron Siskind photograph. At the time, Art & Design was nicknamed the High School of Graffiti & Breakdancing. The hottest graffiti writers and dancers from all five boroughs were my classmates- Mare 139, Fabel, Ence, Doze – I began photographing them. None of us knew yet that the way we were burning off stress, the way we were making something out of nothing, was about to reach and reshape the rest of the world.

By the early nineties, hip hop was in full effect. My friends were traveling the world- dancing on international stages, exhibiting in major galleries. The city was still gritty, but a beautiful new community was blossoming alongside it: rappers, journalists, filmmakers, all building, creating together. This is when my professional life took root. My goal was to capture artists essence. I wasn’t interested in the studio persona they presented to the world: I wanted something deeper, more intimate. I was interested in my subject’s inner life and how that’s expressed through the entirety of the image. Often when I photographed an artist, it would just be the two of us - no assistant, no lighting tech, nothing between us. I took them outside, to the street, to the texture — because that texture was part of them. It was what they were living, what informed them, and what informed me, every single day. There’s a vulnerability in that rawness that a studio can never capture. I shot color slides with a Leica M6 and an M4-P for b/w - quiet, small, unobtrusive cameras that let me stay close without distracting. I wasn't there to interrupt what I was witnessing, what was being birthed. Once Snoop looked at a photo I'd taken of him from his first video shoot twenty years prior and said, "I look so open, you don’t see pictures of me like that back then. I never let my guard down- you must have hip hop running through your veins".

Looking at these images now, more than thirty years later, I'm struck by how much of that era's rawness has vanished. A city and a community caught before either fully knew what they were becoming. I didn't set out to document history; I set out to see the people around me clearly, without pretense. That's still what I'm after every time I raise a camera."

Libro: Here I Am