Jamel Shabazz’s Poignant Images of “A Time Before Crack”

Over the past twenty years, Shabazz has published a range of books about the Black experience in New York. He’s drawn to images of pride, self-fashioning, and vulnerability. He was recently the subject of a solo retrospective at the Bronx Museum, and he won the 2022 Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl Book Prize. Later this year, he will publish “Albums,” the definitive survey of his life’s work, from his teen-age years to now. But he felt it was important to republish “A Time Before Crack,” given how crack and its aftereffects in policing and policy still reverberate through today’s New York. Back in the two-thousands, he couldn’t find anyone to supply an essay connecting the dots between urban neglect, failed social policy, and the proliferation of the illicit drug trade. But the new edition features essays, poems, and testimonials from the playwright and actor Liza Jessie Peterson, the photographer Joe Conzo, Jr., and the attorney Kenneth J. Montgomery, among others, and these texts lend a clearer sense of context for Shabazz’s work.

Social media was in its infancy when Shabazz first published “A Time Before Crack.” Nowadays, people who recognize friends, family members, or themselves in his photos contact him all the time. One subject remarked that he’d captured her in the best moment of her life, before she fell prey to drug use. “I look at my role as being almost like alchemy. I had an ability to freeze time,” he said. “And then, come to find out later on, I’m able to throw out that moment and share it to a larger universe, and give it a whole new meaning, a whole new life of its own.”