Internet Archive Book Club Vol. 1
Who Shot Ya? Three Decades of Hip Hop Photography by Ernie Paniccioli.
This is going to be the beginning of a hopefully weekly free newsletter highlighting a cool publication I found on Internet Archive recently. Some write ups will be longer than others but the overall reason I’m doing this is to share some of the useful resources I use frequently for research. Internet Archive is a non-profit database that was started in 1996 in San Francisco. The site hosts an unimaginable amount of data including 41 million texts, 866 billion archived web pages, 1.1 million archived software files, all at your finger tips. Some texts require you to create an account but its completely free! While often overlooked and under appreciated, Internet Archive leads the legal battle surrounding copyright and fair usage, and like Wikipedia, is only really supported through donations, so please consider if you enjoy it!
Now that we have our introduction to Internet Archive out of the way, we can introduce the first book! “Who Shot Ya? Three Decades of Hip Hop Photography” was published in 2002 and follows the career of Ernie Paniccioli after continued encouragement from of his friend and the books’ editor, Kevin Powell. Known to many as ‘Brother Ernie’, the photographer was born in Brooklyn in 1947. At age 13 he moved to Greenwich Village and surrounded himself with artists and musicians, it was there where he first explored his artistic side. During his time in the military, Paniccioli began experimenting with collage using newspapers, magazines, and other found materials. It wasn’t until he returned in 1971 that he borrowed a friend’s Canon AE-1 and fell in love with photography.
By the 80s, Ernie had established himself as a press and event photographer in the city and in 1989 became the chief photographer for the now infamous ‘Word Up!’ magazine. There he captured iconic moments of the early days of hip hop, graffiti, and b-boying. With a mixture of candid and staged, Ernie Paniccioli shows us his perspective of over 30 years in hip hop, with a stacked lineup of photos of Afrika Bambaataa Futura2000, Rock Steady Crew, Eric B., Rakim, Slick Rick, Too $hort, Jay-Z, Grandmaster Flash, Fab 5 Freddy, Naughty By Nature, and so many more. With this book released in 2002, a new book of Ernie’s work was released in 2018! So many gems I had never seen before in this book. Hope you enjoy this kind of content!