The 79-year-old looks back on a career of capturing graffiti and the hip-hop scene in Manhattan through the 70s and 80s
In the late 1970s,
New York photographer Henry Chalfant embarked on a potentially dangerous project – to shoot graffiti on the city’s subway cars.
“I was a middle-aged white man, so I would be stopped by the
police and they’d say politely, ‘Sir, what are you doing?” recalls the 79-year-old photographer recently in The Bronx. “I’d tell them ‘It’s for a school project, I’m a teacher,’ I lied to them right off the bat.”