Music, Photography

Roots Picnic music festival. Philadelphia. June 4, 2016. The day the after the great Muhammad Ali passed away

Publishers

Le Grand Jeu

Info

42 pages

2026

248mm × 194mm

Softcover

SKU

AB8920

Cost

£19.00
"On June 4, 2016, I took the train from New York to Philadelphia to attend the Roots Picnic music festival. I had wanted to go for years and never had the chance. No one in my entourage was interested in going with me, so, as an obsessive music head, I went alone. Future, DMX, Kehlani, Anderson .Paak and Kaytranada were playing, and I was not going to miss that. Back then, these artists were already the soundtrack to my days as I endlessly walked the streets of New York with my iPhone. Music on, camera ready. I wanted to pay tribute to the beauty and the chaos of the city I had moved to - midlife - a few years earlier. Street photography became a way to document places, people and my own sense of belonging. As a keen observer of my times, the infamous New York street style always caught my eye. What we choose to wear says a lot about who we are, what shaped us or what we stand for. So when I got to Philly on that hot Saturday, fashion was what struck me right away. A parade of vintage tees. A moving archive of cultural references. Old rap tours, basketball legends, films from the ’90s. An entire generation wearing the symbols of another. Mine. I was immediately captivated by what these t-shirts revealed about heritage, nostalgia and our collective memory.  That weekend was also the weekend Muhammad Ali passed away. Seeing so many young people wearing Ali t-shirts said something about how certain images and figures travel time. I didn’t photograph the rarest T-shirts or the most beautiful ones, but the ones that strongly and instinctively resonated with me. The ones that reflected my own sense of culture, my own heritage - and what, I think, deserves to remain."