Ricky Powell, 59, who chronicled early hip-hop, has died
NEW YORK — Ricky Powell, the downtown New York Zelig who with his point-and-shoot camera documented the early years of hiphop’s ascendance as well as a host of other subcultural scenes and the celebrities and fringe characters who populated the city, was found dead Monday in his West Village apartment. He was 59.
The death was confirmed by his manager and archivist, Tono Radvany, who said a cause had not yet been determined. Powell learned he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease last year and had ongoing heart trouble.
Powell — often referred to, lovingly, as “the Lazy Hustler” — oozed vintage New York City charm and pluck. An inveterate walker, he pounded the pavement with his camera and snapped photos of whatever caught his fancy: superstars, well-dressed passersby, animals.
Crucially, he was proximate to the emergence of the Beastie Boys, which catapulted him into an unanticipated career as tour photographer and key entourage member, giving him a front-row seat to the worldwide explosion of hip-hop beginning in the mid-1980s.
“Although Ron Galella was his hero — he was the original paparazzi — I used to tell Ricky that you also have the flavor of Weegee,” the once-ubiquitous New York street photographer, said Fab 5 Freddy, the early hip-hop impresario and a longtime friend and photo subject of Powell’s. “He was always in the inner circle, one of the only — if not the only person — taking photos.”
Powell’s photographs were intimate and casual, a precursor to the offhand hyper-documentation of the social media era. They often felt fully inside the moment, living it rather than observing it. His subjects were varied: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, captured on the street outside a gallery opening; Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter, Sofia, at one of her early fashion shows; Run-DMC posing in front of the Eiffel Tower; a pre-superstar Cindy Crawford in a nightclub bathroom; people sleeping on park benches.
“He wasn’t trained, he didn’t know how to compose a shot, he didn’t know what an aperture was,” said Vikki Tobak, editor of the photo anthology “Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop” (2018) and curator of a traveling exhibition of the same name, both of which included Powell’s work. “But you could feel his curiosity about the people he photographed, so none of that really mattered. He made people laugh and feel at ease; you see all that in his photos.”
Ricky Powell was born Nov. 20, 1961, in Brooklyn and grew up mostly in the West Village. He attended LaGuardia Community College in Queens and graduated from Hunter College in Manhattan with a degree in physical education.
His mother, Ruth Powell, was a schoolteacher — he did not know his father — but also, more crucially, a habitué of downtown clubs like Max’s Kansas City, where she would bring Ricky while he was still a child. She is his only immediate survivor.
“I grew up quick, dude. Fast,” Powell says in “Ricky Powell: The Individualist,” a documentary about his life that was to have its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last year but was delayed by the Coronavirus pandemic. It is now scheduled for this year’s festival, in June.
Josh Swade, who directed the documentary, said Powell had a raw social and cultural intelligence, “from being just out in the streets of New York in the ’60s and ’70s, fending for yourself.”