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BOOKS

Gonzo Histography
Joe Conzo, Jr., documents the birth of hip-hop in Born in the Bronx.

By Victor Cruz-Lugo

Today it is hard to imagine life without hip-hop culture. This musical art form, with its roots in the tough streets of the Bronx, New York, has permeated the planet’s cultural landscape. It is as much seen—through dance and the style of clothing youths, as well as adults, choose to wear—as it is heard. And it is almost always felt in the contemporary urban experience. Step out into the world and you will sense hip-hop humming just below the surface, now and again erupting to the fore. And though now heavily commercialized, it still vibrates with the possibility of artistic freedom.
Photographer Joe Conzo, Jr. (aka Joey Kane) was there in the 1970s when the music was being born. In Born in the Bronx: A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop (Rizzoli, www.rizzoliusa.com), a collaborative book project, Conzo’s black-and-white images capture this art form as it boldly bursts from its gritty urban cradle. The book is a spin-off of his hip-hop photography exhibition that toured Europe and Japan.
Conzo, who spoke to Hispanic via phone from New York, captured with his camera the hip-hop movement’s infancy and energy. Back then, he says, it was more about fun than business.
“We were just having a good time, living for the next party and the next chance to express ourselves through the music,” he recalls. “But what started from a bunch of youths in the South Bronx has turned into a billion dollar industry.”
The grandson of Bronx activist Evelina Antonetty and the son of Tito Puente manager and sidekick Joe Conzo, Sr., Conzo, Jr. grew up in a politically and culturally charged environment. He has Puerto Rican, Cuban and Italian ancestry and jokes that he has a Dominican upbringing. But the South Bronx was also a drug-addled neighborhood and Conzo succumbed to heroin addiction. “You know my history. I had to put the camera down for a while to fight my demons, and I did,” he says. Now a Bronx fire department ambulance driver as well as a photographer, Conzo, who is also known for his shots of prominent salsa musicians, is being recognized as the first hip-hop photographer. And he has picked up the camera again, a move that triggered the European exhibit, the book and increasing fame.
Conzo’s books and exhibitions, he says, are part of completing his recovery process as well as a means of claiming his identity as a photographer and as a lover and participant in an art form that defined him. “I loved the culture of hip-hop... It’s a way of life. How you speak and how you dress... and I’m a firm believer that I can’t keep what I have unless I share it,” he says. “One of the fundamentals of recovery is sharing your sobriety. So I will share my photography with the world.”
Conzo befriended and photographed, among others, early hip-hop’s Cold Crush Brothers, one of the first rapping crews to emerge. The negatives featuring images of the earliest, and many would argue, most important, rap battles in the history of the art form were safely kept by his mother Lorraine Montenegro while Conzo recovered from addiction. When he reached for his camera again five years ago, he resurrected those negatives as well—as his career and identity as a photographer.
Assembled by Swedish collector, curator and editor Johan Kugelberg, Born in the Bronx places Conzo’s photographs alongside texts by seminal figures behind the music. Hip-hop founding father Afrika Bambaataa pens a heartfelt foreword in Born in the Bronx, while author Jeff Chang offers a hip-hop timeline that reveals the indelible intersects between black and Puerto Rican culture as this art form was germinating. Before concluding in an explosion of texts by an assortment of hip-hop insiders who lived the birth of the movement, Conzo’s photographs are accompanied by the ingeniously resourceful pre-desktop flyer art of graphic designer Buddy Esquire.
“When it comes to hip-hop [Hispanics] have been there since day one, from MCs, to DJs, to graffiti artists, to break dance artists ... and all the pioneers will tell you that,” he says. “And actually Tito Puente has a guest appearance on the first rap big hip-hop recording Rapper’s Delight,” he adds.
Conzo’s photographs, once nearly lost, capture the force, power and pleasure of this cultural movement born of extraordinary creativity under challenging circumstances. Conzo says he hopes they will help restore some lost innocence, as well.
“Rap has gotten a bad rap. Back in the day, you had a beef you took it out on the turntable and on the mic. Today you pick up the paper and some rap star is killing another rap star and degrading women. That’s not hip-hop. What I got out of it was the humble beginnings of it, and that’s what I want to give back.”