Image via Complex Original
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When the movie Wild Styles came out in 1983, the rest of the world got a peek into what was really happening at the underbelly of cool in New York City. Starring Fab Five Freddy, Lee Quinones, the Rock Steady Crew, Cold Crash Brothers and others, the movie served as both the first major film that gave voice to a growing counter culture and graffiti, and served as a turning point for director Charlie Ahearn’s career.
After decades of staying in touch with the true mavens of hip hop, Charlie Ahearn recently wrapped up a new project spotlighting one of the first street photographers in the most literal sense of the word. Jamel Shabazz Street Photographer is Ahearn’s documentary about the Back in the Days photographer, and the film includes interviews with Jamel Shabazz, KRS-One, Fab 5 Freddy and many of the subjects Shabazz captured throughout the 80s. The documentary premiers this Sunday at BAMcinemaFest in Brooklyn.
We caught up with the man behind the film as he takes us through his six-year process of making a documentary. Click through to see more from the Wild Styles director.
Jamel Shabazz Street Photographer at BAMcinemaFest
30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, June 26, 3:30
What attracted you to this project and to the work of Jamel Shabazz?
I was around in the street when the photographs were made. I look at these photographs very personally. So even though I may not be from Red Hook, or East Flatbush in Brooklyn, I was around kids that were part of this wave of culture coming out of the 70s. Jamel Shabazz’s vision is very strongly self-identified to his own experience, so there’s very little sense of separation when you see an art form that’s so directly expressing one’s own life.
The first picture I was overwhelmed with was the cover of Back in the Days (above). I just saw that book cover and I completely identified with that image 100%. I lived in Times Square, right where that picture was taken. He’s captured a moment in time where these two young kids are posing rather elegantly, but everything else in the picture is the chaos of 42nd street. And that’s art. And I thought when I saw that cover, “this is an artist that I really want to get to know.” This was right off the bat.
How did you approach the subjects in the documentary? What did you discover during this process?
I met some of Jamel’s subjects at one of Fred’s (Fab 5 Freddy) openings. We met a day to meet in this park, and I was setting up a tripod and people were just cruising by with cars and jumping out of their cars with the book (Back in the Days), people that hadn’t seen each other in years, people that were in the book.
They’re not known, and that’s the first thing to be known about Jamel’s photographs: he’s not a celebrity photgrapher, he’s not documenting hip-hop culture in the sense of “who painted this mural” or “Who’s DJing.”
These people are, as he calls it, the generals; people who are holding down corners in Brooklyn. You could call them everyday people but they’re not everyday people. And they would only reveal themselves to people who know who they are. He gives off no information in the book as to who this person is really, who that person is, so I felt it was really important in making this, to let some of them talk. That’s part of what makes this book an underground classic.
Why don’t you think Jamel named people in his works?
We’re talking about street culture, we’re not talking about hip-hop. Hip-hop is just a word. We’re talking about guys who are significant on a certain block because of who they are and what they do. And because Jamel was working at Rikers, he was seeing the same people moving into Rikers and back out on the street, and that’s part of the street culture. And that’s something we can’t talk about. You can’t talk about people that are in prison. You can, but you don’t. It’s like fight club: the first rule in fight club is “you don’t talk about fight club.” And you understand that. That’s the first rule of being on the street. You don’t go flapping your mouth about who somebody was, about you just saw them do this or do that, so…how do you make a movie about that?
That’s a good question. How DO you make a movie about that?
Well I’m not talking in the movie. I don’t say a word. But I can tell you that the people that I interviewed in the movie are walking a very narrow path between revealing things that are meant to be revealed and not revealing things. And like everything else in this experience, you’re just gonna have to work your way through that. But when you meet these people, you know these people have experience. There’s a reason why Jamel Shabazz working in Rikers knew a lot of people. There’s a lot you can’t talk about.
This isn’t like Oprah, where everyone splashes out their insides on the TV screen. It’s like the cool pose. The cool pose means that there’s things going on and we respect that, and that's it.
After you completed the documentary, what happened next?
Kenzo (of Kenzo Digital) put the trailer together. Kenzo is like a hip-hop head; he's done some amazing work on the underground. I knew about Kenzo. Kenzo knew about me.
I’d already been working on it at that point for about six years. And sometimes the hard thing is how to land the plane. And that’s the hard thing about film making: we’ve got lots of essential ingredients here, now how do you make it into something?
So Kenzo acted as a post-post producer who connected me with people. And Kenzo came up with the idea to make a trailer because he said he believed in the power of the internet and how a trailer can really operate on the internet. And I was like “dope.” And the trailer is very unpretentious. We’re not trying to impress you. It’s very simple. I feel really happy with the way it worked.
above image of Charlie Ahearn and Jazzy Ivy, who appears in the documentary
How did this documentary get picked up for BAMcinemaFest?
I was talking to BAM, and BAM offered me the screening. And the beauty of it was the timing. I had been talking to them for some time saying “okay, there’s a 10th anniversary and Back in the Days: Remix is coming out. I knew this anniversary was coming from a year ago, and I didn’t want to put my film out six months after the anniversary, but I didn’t want it to come out before this happens. I wanted to have this screening take place at a time when this book was coming out.
And once BAM liked the idea, they did everything, and they ran with it. They said "We’re gonna have a festival, and we’re going to put Jamel Shabazz on the cover of every poster." And now every poster uses the same image.
What do you think viewers will take away from this documentary?
You don’t have to dress it up, you know, like a paparazzi. Jamel doesn’t have shots of stars or stars on the rise. I’m not knocking it. I do it myself. I’m not against taking a picture of someone I consider great, but that’s not what Jamel is doing.
Jamel is into how it looks. And the posing is expressing something that goes very deep in hip hop culture, which is the way people represent themselves. But I don’t have any doubt that Jamel didn’t just go up to these guys and snap this picture. He spent a lot of time talking to these guys and building up this geometric form here. I mean this is Jamel creating a canvas. This is art.