Joe Conzo, Jr., grew up in a proud, politically engaged family of Puerto Rican New Yorkers. His father, Joe, Sr., was a historian of Latin music who was tight with the scene’s biggest stars—Tito Puente, Johnny Pacheco, Ray Barretto. His grandmother was the activist Evelina López Antonetty, whose fierce work organizing on behalf of schoolchildren earned her a reputation among locals as the “Hell Lady of the Bronx.” In 1981, she spearheaded protests against the production of “Fort Apache, the Bronx,” a cop movie starring Paul Newman that many residents feared would portray their neighborhood in a poor light. Conzo, still in his teens, grabbed his camera and headed to the demonstrations, too.

Conzo first began taking pictures as a pretense. It was his way of communicating with people, moving between different South Bronx cliques, from local basketball stars to the pretty girls he may have been too intimidated to approach otherwise. With the camera around his neck, he became known as Joey Snapz. In one of his early photos, a teen-age Conzo shoots a selfie in a mirror, his bold Afro and confident smile obscuring his inner shyness.

At the time, something new was taking root in the neighborhood: young d.j.s were combing old records for new rhythms, others were rapping over these so-called break beats, dancers were contorting their limbs in radical new ways. Black and brown kids were representing, but there were few camera crews or journalists around to record it. So Conzo began documenting everything he saw. His photos from that time, which are collected in the volume “Born in the Bronx,” provide some of the most intimate glimpses we have of what would become known as hip-hop. (The book was originally published in 2007, by Rizzoli; a new edition, edited by the historian Johan Kugelberg, was published this spring, by 1XRUN.)

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