Here I Am

Here I Am collects Lisa Leone's photographs of the New York hip-hop scene of the early 1990s, made while the Bronx-born photographer was working alongside the culture she documents.

The pictures, in color and black and white, cover a moment when dance, freestyle, and pop were still mixing freely. The movement's own participants were setting its terms, not the record labels or MTV. The book runs 103 pages in a small oblong quarto format. Photo-illustrated boards and endpapers wrap an introduction by Leone and texts by Rosie Perez, Fab 5 Freddy, Fabel, Nas, and graffiti artist Mare 139. Perez writes of seeing in the pictures "the fun and challenge the music industry still offered," from a generation that "still dictated what it was, and what it meant to us."

Here I Am was published by Minor Matters Books in Seattle in 2014. Leone worked as a photographer and later as a film and television director across the same downtown New York and hip-hop circles pictured here. This book gathers that early photographic record into a single object for the first time.