Ernest Cole New York City, U.S.A. Circa 1971.
“One of the strangest phenomena of street photography is when the photographer appears to engage in a form of cultural prophecy. The collision of today with tomo
(...) rrow requires an uncanny ability to sense the future in the present.
Ernest Cole's 1971 image of a New York hipster predicts the b-boy stylings of the mid-1980s: the dinky hat, the sportswear, the early version of a stereo beatbox. The unexpected pose of the proto-b-boy seems to leap forward decades to the pages of style magazines like The Face and iD.
And the new culture is neatly complemented by Cole's parallel pictures of graffiti adorning the New York streets, years before books began to collate and document that burgeoning art form. How strange it must have been for Ernest Cole, to watch the development of hip hop culture during the 1970s and 1980s - an identity that he had presciently foreseen in the late 1960s.”
– Estate of Ernest Cole © Ernest Cole | Magnum Photos
