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Look Back At The Photography Of Legend And Icon Ricky Powell
COURTESY OF TONO RADVANY
A Look Back At The Photography And Life Of The Late Ricky Powell.
Credit…Ricky Powell
ABOUT RICKY POWELL
Mr. Powell — often referred to, lovingly, as “the Lazy Hustler” — oozed vintage New York City charm and pluck. An inveterate walker, he pounded the pavement with his camera and snapped photos of whatever caught his fancy: superstars, well-dressed passers-by, animals.
Crucially, he was proximate to the emergence of the Beastie Boys, which catapulted him into an unanticipated career as tour photographer and key entourage member, giving him a front-row seat to the worldwide explosion of hip-hop beginning in the mid-1980s.
Credit…Ricky Powell
Mr. Powell’s photographs were intimate and casual, a precursor to the offhand hyper-documentation of the social media era. They often felt fully inside the moment, living it rather than observing it.
His subjects were varied: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, captured on the street outside a gallery opening; Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter, Sofia, at one of her early fashion shows; Run-DMC posing in front of the Eiffel Tower; a pre-superstar Cindy Crawford in a nightclub bathroom; people sleeping on park benches.
RICKY POWELL / COURTESY OF TONO RADVANY
Keith Haring
Credit…Ricky Powell
Credit…Ricky Powell
Ricky Powell even had a toy of himself as well.
The Lil’ Ricky Bong was produced and manufactured by KNOX TOYS. KNOX, filmmaker and artist, created multiple short films and feature length documentaries. He is perhaps best known for Day in the Lyfe, which captured street level graffiti across the United States in the late 00s. Some of this documentary can be found in Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop.
Over the past five years, KNOX moved into a new medium, 3d printed sculptures. His recent series includes figures from Andrew Shirley’s Wastedland2. “The process of creating 3d models from people, reminds me of old time photography like daguerreotypes because the subject is required to stay still for several minutes while I walk around and scan them.”
Originally, the plan was to create a toy sculpture of Ricky Powell, but when photos of the prototype were posted to Instagram, the legendary Fab Five Freddy threw out the idea of turning it into a bong. We jumped on it and the result is this extremely limited edition fully smokeable piece of art.
All bongs are manufactured by KNOX and then hand painted by artist Natasha Quam at KNOX TOYS in Brooklyn. Lil’ Ricky stands 8.5″ tall and comes in a wall mountable clamshell packaging with a limited edition cardboard insert celebrating the Lazy
Ricky Powell, the downtown New York Zelig who with his point-and-shoot camera documented the early years of hip-hop’s ascendance as well as a host of other subcultural scenes and the celebrities and fringe characters who populated the city, was found dead on Feb. 1 in his West Village apartment. He was 59.