Collection: Henry Chalfant

Henry Chalfant (born 1940) is an American photographer and filmmaker who became one of the principal documentarians of New York subway graffiti and hip-hop culture in the late 1970s and 1980s. His photographs of painted subway cars, produced in collaboration with Martha Cooper, were collected in Subway Art (1984), which became one of the most widely distributed books on graffiti and remains a foundational document of the movement. Chalfant also co-directed the documentary film Style Wars (1983), a film about New York graffiti writers that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. His archive constitutes a significant record of a cultural moment centred on the New York transit system.