Hank O'Neal | Richard Hambleton & Jean-Michel Basquiat 'Skull' | Lower East Side, New York City, 1982

Hank O’Neal — Richard Hambleton & Jean-Michel Basquiat ‘Skull’, Lower East Side, New York City, 1982

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. His Lower East Side work captures the same milieu that produced Basquiat, Keith Haring, and the first generation of artists to move graffiti 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.

This photograph captures Richard Hambleton’s signature “Shadowman” silhouette — the looming black painted figure he stencilled across Lower Manhattan through the early 1980s — alongside Basquiat’s graffiti tag “Skull,” at 34 East 12th Street. The two marks, made by two artists who would both become central figures in the decade that followed, share a single wall in a single frame: a document of a scene in the process of becoming itself.

Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.

C-Print on aluminium Dibond mount
81 × 104 cm (sheet); 84.5 × 107 cm (framed)
Signed by the artist
Limited edition of 50