There is perhaps no photographer who captured the Eighties and Nineties hip-hop scenes in New York better than Ricky Powell.
Known best for his working relationship with the Beastie Boys, Powell was a prolific shooter who captured iconic images of Run-DMC, Madonna, Eric B and Rakim, Laurence Fishburne, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Sofia Coppola, Vin Diesel and other icons of the downtown Manhattan scene for the better part of a decade. His photographs ran in the New York Times, the Village Voice and this very magazine, among others.
Now, the camera turns on him: Powell will be the subject of a new documentary, Ricky Powell: The Individualist, set to premiere at the We Are One Global Film Festival on Saturday, May 30th at 5:30 p.m. ET. Directed by Josh Swade and produced by TIME Studios and MaggieVision Productions, the film features archival photographs and footage shot by Powell himself along with interviews with Powell and some of his most well-known subjects.
The We Are One Global Film Festival is a 10-day digital event to be held exclusively on YouTube, premiering films that can’t be shown in theaters at the moment due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Produced and organized by Tribeca Enterprises, the event will begin on May 29th and is a joint collaboration between some of the world’s largest film festivals — including Cannes, Berlin and Venice — that have been canceled this year due to the coronavirus.
