Henry Chalfant: New York's defining street art photographer
In the late 1970s, New York photographer Henry Chalfant embarked on a potentially dangerous project – to shoot graffiti on the city’s subway cars.
“I was a middle-aged white man, so I would be stopped by the police and they’d say politely, ‘Sir, what are you doing?” recalls the 79-year-old photographer recently in The Bronx. “I’d tell them ‘It’s for a school project, I’m a teacher,’ I lied to them right off the bat.”
Over the course of 10 years, Chalfant took over 1,500 photos of graffiti art, subway cars, rappers and break dancers. A selection of 100 rare photos are on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts as part of his retrospective, Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987, which traces the early days of hiphop and graffiti, long before they were global movements.
As one of the most notable “graffiti photographer”, a great deal of subway art would be gone forever if it wasn’t for Chalfant, who was there to immortalize it in the Bronx and upper Manhattan through the late 1970s and 1980s.
Chalfant, who lived on the Upper East Side, would take the train to the Bronx if there was a subway mural he
wanted to photograph.
“My method was to stand at the uptown subway platform and wait until the downtown train stopped on the other side of the tracks,” he said. “The doors don’t open on that side, so as long as it sat there, I took pictures.”
The exhibit is divided into three main sections: photos from the 1970s and 1980s featuring early rappers, graffiti artists and break-dancers, a recreation of his Soho photo studio, and lastly, a room of life-sized, tagged subway cars made of vinyl sheeting (there are train sound effects, too).
“The majority of these photos were taken in the Bronx,” he said over the hum of boom bap rap beats, blaring from a boombox seated in a corner of the museum.
It all started when the New York film director Charlie Ahearn told Chalfant about the graffiti artists in the late 1970s. “He first tipped me off to its existence, he went to uptown clubs and took photos of it in the late 1970s,” he said.
Chalfant started photographing graffiti in 1977. “I was watching them paint, and once I figured out how things worked, then started shooting them,” he said.
The first train he shot was a subway train tagged with the phrase “Merry Christmas” by the Fab 5ive graffiti crew, who hailed from Staten Island and specialized in full-car subway murals.
He continued to shoot graffiti artists like Futura, who painted subway cars alongside Keith Haring and JeanMichel Basquiat, and the murals of Dez, an artist who went on to become DJ Kay Slay, a hip-hop artist who has collaborated with Busta Rhymes, Rick Ross and Fat Joe.
“I was around to see the emergence of hip-hop,” said Chalfant. “This is definitely an exhibition with a majority of artworks that happened before graffiti was accepted as art and before rap was a big industry.”
There are rare photos of Madonna in 1983 dancing with Crazy Legs, the