Hip Hop

“…This is the world that David Scheinbaum captures with effortless brilliance and transcendent beauty. His images stick in the eye for their lean and muscular portrayals of bodies in motion, and for their voluptuous characterizations of mouths in movement. He catches speech the moment it spills from lips fixed around sentences that rush in staccato fury or fall back in asymmetrical repose. Scheinbaum’s aesthetic voice and visual language speak through images that zing , blur, haze, identify, splatter, brush, clarify, and even coagulate like celluloid blood on fleshly surfaces. If renowned photographer Roy DeCarava famously shot the sound he saw when Coltrane blew his horn, then David Scheinbaum shoots the music he tastes when his eyes are hungry for poetic truth. If hip-hop artists are ghetto deities born to fly the artistic coop and soar to the musical heavens and back, then Scheinbaum is one of their most faithful chroniclers, recording their ascent or return one gesture, one image, at a time. To paraphrase the holy book: In the beginning was the word, and the word became flesh and spoke among us through pavement prophets. What they said is on record; how they looked when they said what they said is on record, too. Turn these pages and see…”

Michael Eric Dyson, excerpt from the introduction to Hip Hop: Portraits of an Urban Hymn.

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