Maï Lucas – All Eyes On Me

All Eyes On Me is a long-term project, born of the passion of Paris-based photographer Maï Lucas. Shot between 1990 and 2010, her photographs capture the hip-hop and street culture of New York’s African-American and Hispanic communities, from Jones Beach to the Bronx, via Harlem and East New York. These were the years in which New York’s African-Americans and Caribbean Latinos were able to deploy a singular creative power, forging an identity of their own, free from dominant codes and norms. This expression, deeply rooted in the margins, carried a new aesthetic and energy, still untouched by commercial logic. Long before it was taken up and re-configured by the fashion and branding industries — spaces in which this culture has now been diluted, if not deliberately projected — it affirmed a fiercely independent symbolic sovereignty. By approaching her subjects with respect, empathy, and love, Maï Lucas creates photographs of palpable authenticity, imbued with grace and deep humanity. She reveals the beauty of a youth whose creativity is expressed as much in everyday clothing and family life as in ecstatic dance and celebration. Lucas’s protagonists shine with pride in her portraits.

Born in Paris in 1968 to a Vietnamese mother and a French father, Maï Lucas began photographing in her teens when her father gave her a camera. Since then, photography has become her preferred artistic medium. Swept up as a young girl in the exhilarating whirlwind of Paris’s emerging hip-hop scene, she documented the birth of this movement and her circle through the lens of a Nikon FM2. Several of the young hip-hop artists she immortalised at the time went on to become major figures in the French music and film scenes, whose aesthetics and lifestyle are now omnipresent.