In MoMA and UNIQLO’s new Art for All video series, we delve into an artist’s process and inspirations to reveal connections between art and life. Here, street photographer Jamel Shabazz talks about the influence of his own father, the work of Leonard Freed, and the people of New York City.
“Street photography is a way of life,” says Shabazz, best known for his vibrant images of everyday people on New York City’s streets and subway. We visited his home studio for a guided tour through four decades of images and rare insights into his process. Then we ventured onto the subway, where Shabazz reunited with familiar faces and recreated one of his most iconic images.
“It’s not about me,” he says. “I’m just a vessel using my position to freeze time and then thaw the moments out later on so people can see them and heal, rejuvenate, or just celebrate.”
In this new series it was important for us to take our viewers beyond MoMA's walls to the locations that are important to artists and their process. For this episode, we focused on the theme of "street photography." We filmed in artist Jamel Shabazz's studio where we had access to his archive and followed him as he photographed in the subway and recreating one of his iconic photographs with his friends. We released the episode on YouTube, on moma.org, and did a collaborative post on Instagram between MoMA and Jamel Shabazz that got extremely high engagement, especially in the comments.
We saw an outpouring of positive feedback on this episode online. On YouTube, the video got 64K views, gained our channel 1.5K subscribers, had a very high clickthrough rate of 4.4% and received 81 comments. Our Instagram post got 236K Impressions, 9.5K likes, and 336 comments, extremely high engagement in the comments for our platform. The comments on YouTube ranged from those who knew Shabazz and his work, to those that praised the filmmaking, to those that were inspired by the story. Some select comments include:
More stories like this please. I have to look up more of his work. Thank you
Wow! What a beautiful documentary . Jamal Shabazz , thank your sir for your services and marking your place in the history of America.
What a beautiful story. Definitely inspires me to keep telling stories thru images. Thanks for this.
absolutely amazing. loved hearing about his passion for the craft
I loved every minute of this.
Thank you for this. Moving, and motivating.
This is so inspiring to me. So many answers to some deep questions I had for myself in this video. Thanks
