As a nod to the 40th year since hip hop was founded in New York’s south Bronx, the Gladstone Hotel is showing a selection of iconic photographic portraits of hip hop artists and emcees for the Contact Photography Festival. This exhibition does not only document the cultural phenomenon through these individuals, but also explores the communication of persona through photography, and the collaboration between photographer and artist to convey the subject’s identity, in particular the relationship between the individual’s past roots and present artistry.
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Two years after the International Olympic Committee decided that Sochi would host the 2014 Winter Olympics, photographer Rob Hornstra and journalist Arnold van Bruggen decided to undertake an ambitious project of “slow journalism,” filming, photographing, and capturing oral histories in Sochi over four years.
Though the artists included in this exhibition look to history and ancestry to construct identity, their perspectives are not documentary or historical. Their work is exploratory, propositional, and contemporary, and challenges others to consider themselves in the same way. To see the issue of identity so deeply rooted in the oeuvre of even just these eight international artists suggests that we are at a moment where this discussion is relevant.
