Hempstead's Jamel Shabazz's photographs as art on display at Hofstra
Hempstead photographer Jamel Shabazz, in front of one of his favorite photographs at a Hofstra University Museum of Art exhibition featuring his work. Credit: Debbie Egan-Chin
Hempstead resident Jamel Shabazz’s photographs are collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian...
Now the Hofstra University Museum of Art has opened the first solo exhibition on Long Island for Shabazz, one of the preeminent recorders of New York City street life.
"Love Is the Message" is comprised of nearly 50 prints from the artist’s collection and pieces related to his work. Shabazz, 65, became famous for portraits of Black and brown people posing in the style and manner of early hip-hop stars, but he has also captured moments of candid intimacy between family members and friends, and there are many of those on the Emily Lowe Gallery walls.
The exhibit is intended to capture "the evolution of hip-hop culture, fashion trends, and music," highlighting the bonds of friends and family," museum director Sasha Giordano wrote in a forward to the exhibition catalog.
Talking to students
Shabazz, in a talk for visiting high school students Thursday at Hofstra’s student center, said he started taking pictures at 15, partly to cover for a stutter. When you carry a camera, he said, "you immediately have a purpose."
When he got serious about photography, Shabazz told the students, he studied stacks of magazines famous for it: National Geographic, Time, Life. He became "almost addicted" to Life — the era's equivalent, for a curious schoolchild, "of what the internet is today," where he saw images of a young man shot in the 1968 Newark race riots and a young, terrified American soldier in Vietnam. The momentous events behind those photographs were not discussed at home or at his Catholic school, he said.
Shabaz's father, a U.S. Navy photographer, had little use for his son's early work.
"He thought it was garbage" and said so, Shabazz recalled. In the darkroom, the older man took a grease pen to the prints he didn’t like. He died in 1994, before Shabazz became known for his photographs, he said.
Shabazz kept taking pictures but paid the bills as a New York City corrections officer for 20 years, a job that meant 8 to 16 hour days in "a hostile, negative environment." To "balance the frustration," he took his camera into the streets to "document joy. "
Posing human subjects was, and still is, part of Shabazz's artistic practice.
"I like to ask permission whenever I can," he said. Often, "people would like to be photographed but don’t know what to do." Working with them, you "come up with a pose that people would appreciate. You create a situation to bring the image to life."
Spontaneity captured
One posed image shows on of the Hofstra exhibit's curators, Robert Dupreme Eatman, standing on a Brooklyn street in 1985 with his wife and their infant daughter. They are a picture of stylish prosperity — the quintessential American family. (In an interview following the talk, Eatman said his daughter, Ebonasia, died a little more than a year ago. The photo, he said, shows the young family "happy, very happy. This is our family portrait.")
Some of Shabazz’s pictures capture spontaneous moments. They are products of luck and the photographer’s knowledge of light and shutter speed, skills his father drilled into him, Shabazz said. A boy looks up at the viewer from a quiet meal with his father at a table in front of a downtown Brooklyn burger joint; three women stand at the center of a crowded subway, their smiles and beauty reproaching the car’s grim steel.
Shabazz ended his talk by showing the schoolchildren a group shot he’d taken of co-workers at Manhattan Criminal Courthouse in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
"I wanted to capture that moment, because we didn’t know what the future holds," he told them. "These are court officers, lawyers, judges, interpreters — we all came together for this brief photo shoot. This photograph means the world to me."
Then he asked all the children and their teachers to gather by the auditorium wall and squeeze in for a picture. The children, giddy at first, turned silent when he raised his camera.
"Y'all so beautiful, this is going to be the greatest photograph I took all year," he said, and snapped it.
The exhibit runs through Dec. 16. Admission is free.
Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.
