Portraits From the Studio and the Street

Ari Marcopoulos's Portraits From the Studio and the Street is a document of downtown New York in the 1980s, caught at the moment when Pop Art's established figures rubbed shoulders with the emerging worlds of street art and hip-hop.

The book gathers black-and-white portraits made on the sidewalks and in the studios Marcopoulos moved through as a young photographer newly arrived in the city, mixing recognizable figures such as Willem Dafoe, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Queen Latifah with anonymous New Yorkers identified only by a first name or a street corner. First published in 1987 by Bert Bakker in Amsterdam, this 2017 IDEA edition is styled as a photocopy of the original, bound in cloth boards, and adds previously unseen images alongside a new introduction by the writer Glenn O'Brien.

Marcopoulos began working as a photo printer in Andy Warhol's studio after moving to New York in the early 1980s, and went on to build a career photographing skateboarding, snowboarding, hip-hop, and graffiti culture from the inside. Portraits From the Studio and the Street is an early record of the eye O'Brien called "soul photography," the same embedded, unglamorous attention Marcopoulos later brought to his work with musicians, athletes, and his own family.