A Bronx “Family Album” from Hip-Hop’s Early Days

Many of the photos he took during those early years appear in “The South Bronx Family Album.” In addition to Joey, who is pictured sitting cross-legged in a Buddha-like pose, wearing sunglasses and a loose-fitting knit tie, there was Boogie (the jokester and the d.j. in his crew); Eddie (the brawler, whom they called Knuckles because “he had these boulders at the end of his hands that nobody wanted to get hit by”); someone called Pimp; and Watu, Carlos, Santo, Louis, Pete, and Guillermo. There were also the girls they hung out with: Audrina, Maritza, Yolanda, Elaine, Diana, Venus, and others. These are the “family” members at the center of his album. Flores captures them sitting on stoops smoking cigarettes, playing basketball, roughhousing, playing in water gushing from hydrants, sunbathing at Orchard Beach, congregating in front of bodegas, listening to their boom boxes, playing instruments, dancing in the streets, dancing in social clubs. He also took pictures of others in his neighborhood who were outside his circle—girls going to church, people marching and dancing in the Bronx Puerto Rican Day Parade, passengers on graffitied subway trains, kids in front of bodegas, Puerto Rican nationalists who had fired on Congress in the nineteen-fifties, and firefighters dousing buildings engulfed in flames. All of these scenes captured the culture in which hip-hop and breaking were born.