Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the international photography fair Paris Photo with a solo installation “Henry Chalfant: 1980.” Henry Chalfant is known as the most significant documentarian of New York City subway art of the late 1970s and 1980s. His photographs, along with the 1983 film he co-pro- duced with Tony Silver, Style Wars, and the essential text Subway Art, a 1984 book co-authored with Martha Cooper, have immortalized this ephemeral art form and helped launch New York City’s graffiti movement into an international phenomenon. Eric Firestone Gallery (New York and East Hampton) represents the photography and archive of Henry Chalfant.

“Henry Chalfant: 1980” will include 18 monumental photographs documenting graffiti-covered subway cars – 96-inch digital prints on Kodak metallic paper. In addition, 8 of the original sheets of vintage hand-cut, collaged prints will be on view. (Another group of these sheets is currently on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, in the exhibition “Gordon Matta Clark: Anarchitect.”) The cut and collaged prints, on photo album sheets, allow the viewer entry into Chalfant’s process. The installation will be contextualized with a selection of black books (graf- fiti writers’ sketchbooks), and outlines (writers’ design drawings) from Chalfant’s personal archive. A short video about Chalfant, produced by Kodak in 1982, will also be screened. In the video, writers look through a Chalfant album containing hundreds of collaged images of cars, referring to it as the “Book of Knowledge.”

The photographs document work by the most prominent subway writers of New York City, including SKEME, BLADE, MAD PJ, SEEN, LEE, CRASH, DONDI, NOC, and ZEPHYR (and their crews, which include The Crazy Five, United Artists, The Death Squad, and The Rolling Thunders, among others).