Hip Hop Aesthetics

Launched in November 2009, Respect. The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture delivers world-class editorial and images by some of the most celebrated photographers in pop culture.

Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide.

The primary aims of the journal are to analyze and assess past and present urban development and management as a reflection of effective, ineffective and non-existent planning policies; and the promotion of the implementation of appropriate urban policies in both the developed and the developing world.

Back in the Days documents the emerging hip-hop scene from 1980-89, before it became what is today's multi-million-dollar multinational industry.

Featuring rare outtakes from over 100 photoshoots alongside interviews and essays from industry legends, Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop takes readers on a chronological journey from old-school to alternative hip-hop and from analog to digital photography.

Exploring the production of spaces, buildings, and urban environments that embody the creative energies in hip-hop, Hip-Hop Architecture is a newly expanding design philosophy which sees architecture as a distinct part of hip-hop's cultural expression, and which uses hip-hop as a lens through which to provoke new architectural ideas.

Working to understand how ideologies are formed, transmitted, and embedded in the built environment, Craig L. Wilkins deconstructs how the marginalization of African Americans is authorized within the field of architecture. He then outlines how activist forms of expression shape and sustain communities, fashioning an architectural theory around the site of environmental conflict constructed by hip-hop culture.

This is a comprehensive photographic chronicle of the rise of hip-hop, from an urban subculture to a multi-billion-dollar industry whose styles and sound have affected every aspect of popular culture.