Lisa Leone: The female photographer who documented the golden age of hip-hop in New York

euronews (in English)

Euronews Culture spoke with Lisa Leone, a photographer and filmmaker, who began her career shooting for some of the most influential names in hip-hop.

Transcript

00:00 What was happening is that it was, you know, '82, '83, the breakdancing, the graffiti

00:06 scene was just exploding around the world and, you know, friends like Fable

00:11 and Wiggles and Doze and all these people, all of a sudden they needed

00:16 photographs.

00:19 [Music]

00:31 You know, it was just exciting to see and nobody knew where it was gonna go or

00:37 whether it was gonna last, you know, there was that whole thing like this is a fad,

00:41 you know, people are gonna be into this, but you know, to be there for the birth

00:46 and to kind of just watch it grow and grow and grow and grow, yeah, it was really great.

00:52 [Music]

00:54 Being in the session of Illmatic with Nas, it's like history being made there,

01:01 you know, just to witness that and he was so young and just what was happening in

01:07 the studio was incredible. There wasn't as many women photographers, I mean, of

01:12 course, the great Suquan was photographing, so you had to always kind

01:17 of like deal with that. In high school, I was a total B-girl, so, you know, there was

01:24 no, I was coming from it, from the culture, so it was more of, you know, just the

01:31 always being hit on, basically, trying to like have that, where you just had to

01:36 maneuver that like, "All right, all right, all right."

01:38 [Music]

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