Madame Noire | Black Women's Lifestyle Guide | Black Hair | Black Love

It was only when Shabazz began to start pulling together what would eventually become Back in the Days, that he began to think more seriously about the significance of the era. The book was initially titled, Back in the Days: A Time Before Crack, as Shabazz explains, “my pictures illustrate how life was before the crack epidemic hit and took a lot of the innocence away. A lot of people in the book have passed away, some of them have been murdered by individuals in some of the same pictures. But back in the 1970s and 1980s, we as a people were getting it together…and then the crack came. And with the crack came the liquid cocaine in the form of the 40 ounce beer. The guns came into the community and that whole innocence was lost.”

That sense of innocence that Shabazz talks about is even more profound now, as these early moments of hip-hop are continuously remixed and exploited, often for the benefit of corporations and media companies that have no interests in the communities that Shabazz so beautifully captured—and where many continue to struggle.

The 10th anniversary edition of Back in the Days features an introduction by Fred Brathwaite (Fab Five Freddy), an essay from Professor Carlton Usher and an interview with Shabazz by author Jeff Chang. The release of the book occurs just as Shabazz is being featured in a new documentary by Charlie Ahern (of Wild Style fame), Jamel Shabazz: Street Photagrapher. Additionally some of Shabazz’s original photographs are featured in the exhibit the Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection, currently at the Nasher Museum in North Carolina, a show curated by the Wedge Collection owner Dr. Kenneth Montague, an Afro-Caribbean Canadian dentist from Toronto.

The ultimate genius of Shabazz’s work is that he used the impulse to simply capture the world around him and in the process shone a bright light on the ability of young people to make beauty out of their everyday lives. Swag indeed.

Mark Anthony Neal is professor of African-American studies at Duke University.