Who Shot Ya?: Three Decades of Hip Hop Photography

Nearly thirty years ago, Ernie Paniccioli began photographing the graffiti art throughout New York City as well as the young people creating it. Armed with a 35-millimeter camera, Paniccioli literally recorded the beginning salvos of hip hop, today the most dominant youth culture on the planet. Be it Grandmaster Flash at the Roxy, a summer block party in the Bronx, the fresh faces of Queen Latifah and Will Smith, the cocksure personas of Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., and Emimem, or the regal grace of Lauryn Hill, Ernie Paniccioli has been there to showcase hip hop's evolution much in the same way Gordon Parks recorded the Civil Rights Movement, or akin to the manner in which James Van Der Zee, the great photographer of Harlem in the 1920s, met the energy and spirit of his times.

Who Shot Ya? Three Decades of Hip Hop Photography is the first major pictorial history of hip hop culture based around the work of one photographer. Culled from a vast archive, the approximately 150 images in Who Shot Ya? represent the visual diary of a generation, essentially following this socio-political art form from the streets of New York City to the billion-dollar global industry it has become. While some of these iconic renderings have graced the pages of magazines and fanzines through the years, most are published here for the first time.

Ernie Paniccioli has been the chief photographer for Word Up! magazine since 1989. His work has appeared in a variety of books and periodicals, most notably Life, Vibe, Time, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and The New York Times, as well as on MTV and VH1. Beyond the hip hop world, Paniccioli has captured a number of popular figures on film, among them Frank Sinatra, Liza Minelli, John F. Kennedy Jr., Britney Spears, and Ricky Martin. This is Ernie Paniccioli’s first book. He lives in New Jersey.

Kevin Powell is a former senior writer/editor for Vibe magazine and an original cast member of MTV’s The Real World. The author of Recognize, a volume of poetry and In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers, he is also well known as a cultural critic. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Essence. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.