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Background information
"The influential New York photographer Jamel SHABAZZ has created portraits of the city’s communities for over 40 years. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he began photographing people he encountered on New York streets in the late 1970s, creating an archive of cultural shifts and struggles across the city. His portraits underscore the street as a space for self-presentation, whether through fashion or pose. In every instance he aims, in his words, to represent individuals and communities with 'honor and dignity.'
Content
This photo volume, 'Albums' by Jamel SHABAZZ,―awarded the Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl Book Prize―presents, for the first time, his work from the 1970s to 1990s as it exists in his archive: small prints thematically grouped and sequenced in traditional family photo albums that function as portable portfolios.
He 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 that he later shared with their friends and families. Jamel SHABAZZ had his rolls of color film processed at a one-hour photo shop that provided two copies of each print: he typically gave one to his sitters, and the second he organized into changing albums to be shown to future subjects. This book, 'Albums', features selections from over a dozen albums, many never-before-seen, and includes his earliest photographs as well as images taken inside Rikers Island, all accompanied by essays that situate his work within the broader history of photography." (© Steidl Verlag, 2023)