Gallery Opening: "212" with Lisa Leone | October 2, 2026, 7 PM

Gallery Opening: Friday, October 2nd, 7 PM

Says Leone on "212":

"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."

Bronx-born Lisa Leone is an Emmy award winning director, a photographer and DP. She began her career as a photographer documenting early hip-hop, which she exhibits regularly. In 2015 her first monograph Here I Am was published by Minor Matters accompanied by an exhibit at The Bronx Museum. Lisa’s photos have been exhibited throughout the world, in solo and group shows, including the "Contact High" exhibit at ICP and "50 Years of Hip-Hop" at Fotografiska in NYC and Sweden. Lisa segued into cinematography, shooting music videos for artists TLC, Heavy D and D'Angelo. From there, Lisa went on to work with her mentor Stanley Kubrick on his last film Eyes Wide Shut. Upon Kubrick’s death she dived into a deeper study between the relationship of cinema and imagery, continuing to focus on cinematography, shooting over ten independent feature films. Her debut film as writer, director, and cinematographer, Exactly, starring Rosie Perez and Sarita Choudhury premiered at Tribeca, London and Sundance Film Festivals. She’s directed multiple episodes of television including, Power Book III: Raising Kanan, Grey’s Anatomy, East New York and Big Sky. Lisa won a Suncoast Regional Emmy for her documentary on the late artist Christo and his "Surrounded Islands" project. “Remembering Surrounded Islands” was commissioned by The Pérez Art Museum.

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