Collection: Hank O'Neal | C-Print Editions

Hank O'Neal is an American photographer, writer, and record producer whose career has run in close parallel to the cultural scenes he has documented, from jazz musicians of the mid-twentieth century to the downtown New York art world of the late 1970s and 80s. As founder of Chiaroscuro Records and a prolific author, O'Neal has spent decades working alongside the figures he photographs rather than observing from a distance, producing an archive that functions as much as first-hand cultural history as it does fine art photography.

His Lower East Side work captures the same downtown New York milieu that produced Basquiat, Keith Haring, and the first generation of artists to move graffiti and street practice into the gallery system — a small, overlapping community in which photographers, musicians, and visual artists frequently crossed paths in the same studios, clubs, and stretches of wall. O'Neal's images from this period are valued precisely because they were made from inside that world, not after the fact.

Each print is issued as a signed, limited edition C-print on aluminium Dibond mount, a process that produces a flat, durable, gallery-grade surface suited to large-format presentation. As with any documentary photograph of this kind, the value lies as much in the historical moment captured as in the print itself — these are images that cannot be remade, drawn from a scene that no longer exists in the form O'Neal photographed it.

The work available through Creed Gallery is Richard Hambleton & Jean-Michel Basquiat 'Skull', Lower East Side, New York City, 1982, a single frame bringing together Hambleton's "Shadowman" figure and Basquiat's graffiti tag "Skull" on the same Lower East Side wall, signed and from a limited edition of 50. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.