Contact High at the Annenberg

Thanks for checkin' out Bsombin'! I'll never forget the first time I heard Hip-hop music. I was in 3rd grade and I was playing on the playground one day after school. My friend Justin brought his boom box and a couple of his big brother's cassette tapes and told my other friends and I that we had to listen to these tapes his brother let him borrow! He put in a tape from a group called Run DMC that was titled "Raising Hell" and started playing a song called "You Be Illin'". ...As soon as it started, my friends and I were blown away! We had never heard anything like it. But we all agreed that it was awesome! We asked Justin what kind of music it was and he told us it was something called "Rap" music. It was something new that wasn't being played on the radio yet. But we wanted to hear more. He played a few more songs off "Raising Hell" before he ejected it and pulled out another tape from a group called The Beastie Boys. It was titled "Licensed To Ill" and the first song he played for us was "Brass Monkey". Again, we all agreed that it was awesome, as we circled around the boom box dancing. We didn't even know how to dance to this strange new sound, but we didn't care and couldn't hold still while the music played. I fell in love with Hip-hop that day and I've loved her ever since. I went home that day and asked my parents for money to buy one of the tapes. A few days later, my step dad took me to The Warehouse music store and I bought "Raising Hell". That was the first album I bought and the start of my journey into the world of Hip-hop. When I got home I opened up the cassette and took out the sleeve to read and look at the pictures as I listened to the music. I was fascinated by the men who made the music and seeing their pictures made it feel like I could actually relate to them on some level. The images on the sleeve made almost as much of an impact on me as the music itself did. It was then that I started falling in love with the Hip-hop culture. The pictures on that sleeve showed me a world I would have otherwise never seen. A world I wanted to explore and learn more about. They peaked my curiosity and inspired me. Those images were powerful and icon, even then...

Last month, the Annenberg Space for Photography opened a new exhibition called Contact High. Contact High is a visual history of Hip-hop music. It is centered around the contact sheets that the industry photographers used as proofs and shows many of the out takes from shoots that had never been seen before. Contact High also showcases some of the most icon Hip-hop images from over the years and the photographers who took them. When I heard it was opening, I couldn't wait to go check it out. I invited my good friend Jeff (The guy who got me into photography) and headed out to Century City to go geek out on the pictures we fell in love with as kids. As a photographer, I found so much inspiration and motivation to keep working on my craft. As a lover of Hip-hip I went on a magical trip through time reliving some of my own experiences while seeing the images I grew up admiring. It was very nostalgic. Seeing some of the images made me remember the things that were going on in my life when I saw them for the first time. It was also surreal seeing some of the pictures that I hadn't seen. Almost like seeing old friends in a new light.

The exhibition will be on display at the Annenberg until August 19th, for those who would like to see it first hand. And the images from the exhibition are also available as a book which is also titled "Contact High". For those who can't get to the Annenberg, I took some pictures to share with you all. They won't do justice to the original's but at least you can get a feel for what the exhibition is like. Again, I took too many pictures to share all of them. But here are my favorites...