Capturing a Culture

In 1975, at just 14, Glen E. Friedman skateboarded through the streets of Los Angeles with his Kodak Instamatic in hand. Skating in the empty swimming pools of Beverly Hills with his friends, nicknamed the Z-boys, he shoots them without knowing that he is capturing the genesis of modern skateboarding.

From Los Angeles to New York, in the dampness concert halls filled with wild pogo dancers and a flood of decibels, Glen chronicled Hardcore Punk. Both aggressive and conscious, Hardcore Punk became the soundtrack of youth in revolt.

At the end of the 80s, led the Def Jam label, the hip-hop tsunami hit America. Public Enemy, Run DMC, Beastie Boys... all future heavyweights of the rap game were be captured by Glen's lens. Cult founders of an aesthetic movement, their pictures were taken at the turning point in their careers.

At 20, in 1962, Danny Lyon is one of the first to document the birth of the struggle for Civil Rights. Between sit-ins, freedoom rides and stints in prison with Martin Luther King, his work was used to further the cause of the movement and covered widely in the press. He participated in the emancipation movement that would make a black American president possible, thirty years later.

Five years before Easy Rider, three before Hunter S.Thompson's Hell's Angels, Danny describes the lives of these groups who have chosen to live by their own rules, the anti-heroes of the hippie generation.

A daughter of rock, she captured the excitement of the early days of punk in England: the revival mods, skinheads and 2 Tone. Close to bands like The Clash or the Sex Pistols, Janette Beckman also photographed their fans waiting, dancing, shouting their rage, and rejecting the proper British values of Queen, country, and class.

In the early 80s, the pioneers of the Hip Hop movement landed in England for a European tour. Janette Beckman immortalises their arrival. The following year she went to New York to meet the latest breakthrough artists on the rap scene, from Run DMC to NWA.

A simple tag to colorful curved lettering, Henry Chalfant roams subway cars in search of the best graffiti. He was at that time the only one to see any artistic value in the graffiti, which were regularly cleaned and painted over. The story of street art is immortalised in his shots.

Being photographed by Henry soon confers a kind of prestige to street artists on the New York graffiti circuit. They tell him, at dawn, about the new works they have managed to complete in the night.

With the postmodern period in full swing, Henry gives us his view on the turning point that graffiti artists have reached and on the transformation of their art form.

With his first camera in hand, Gavin photographed the Skinhead culture for nearly ten years. Behind the shaved heads, swastikas and steel hulls, his photographs reveal a much more complex culture, with its codes, its style and attitude that left its mark on England.

Between provocation and posturing derived from punk and real political disillusionment, the Skinhead movement split into two camps that would forever transform the skinheads into true urban monsters.

Gavin Watson had been totally immersed in the ultra-violence of the Skinhead movement of his home town. Raves were a liberation, and an exit door to another way of living.