Ricky Powell Pictures at WHAAM! NYC

Summary

• Whaam! reveals Ricky Powell’s early Nineteen Eighties New York images
• Features on a regular basis avenue life and friends like Basquiat, Futura

Ricky Powell’s path as a photographer started within the mid-Nineteen Eighties after a breakup left him stressed in downtown New York. Borrowing a digicam as soon as belonging to his ex-girlfriend, Powell began taking images to move the time. What started as a technique to course of heartbreak shortly grew right into a lifelong apply of documenting town round him.

On view at Whaam!, RICKY POWELL: NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPHS 1980–1990 presents an intimate archive of Powell’s earliest work. Long earlier than his well-known portraits of the Beastie Boys or hip-hop legends, Powell was a neighborhood child wandering Washington Square Park, SoHo and the Lower East Side, capturing pals, storefronts, graffiti and on a regular basis scenes. At the time he was nonetheless working a frozen lemonade stand, however his digicam turned informal afternoons into lasting cultural information.

Powell’s energy was his capacity to maneuver throughout completely different circles—graffiti writers, punks, skaters, rappers, and artists—and {photograph} them as friends, not celebrities. Figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Futura 2000 seem as a part of his neighborhood, not distant icons.

This exhibition is each a tribute to Powell and a portrait of a New York that now not exists, alive with grit, humor and unfiltered creativity. The present is working by way of October 17.

WHAAM!
15 Elizabeth St # 113
New York, NY 10013