Ernie Paniccioli leaned in close. “Yo, take a minute,” he insisted. “You’ve got to listen to this from Public Enemy!”

Ernie is a big man, big enough for anyone with sense to pay attention. The song “Everything” starts to play, and the words fill the room. It’s a soulful litany of all the things Chuck D, the group’s leader, does not have, and the things he needs.

Never was hot/Never was pop
But I never, ever stopped/That real hip-hop.
Got no paparazzi/Got no company that got me
Walking alone in the hood/So it’s easy to spot me.

Who needs paparazzi when you have Ernie? An imposing chronicler of the hip-hop scene from LL Cool J and Biggie Smalls to Queen Latifah and Lil’ Kim, Ernie has been especially close to Public Enemy, counting its members as collaborators, conspirators and counselors. It has been a good month for them: Public Enemy will be inducted tonight into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Ernie recently finished a conference at Cornell University, whose library acquired his vast photographic archive.

It’s been a big climb for the self-taught photographer and Native American activist who prizes creativity and social consciousness. Decades ago, Ernie, now 66, fell in love with the street art, music and dance created in Harlem, Hollis and the South Bronx by young people who had little money but plenty of imagination. But even as some of them became stars, he always sought that glimmer in their personalities that had ignited the culture decades earlier.

“My work shows them as larger than life but also as part of life,” Ernie said. “My work has a pulse. It three-dimensionalized a lot of these people. And the artists themselves have always let me be up close and personal. There never been dichotomy between the photographer and the artist. It’s a circle.”

That approach carried him through the decades. He started in the 1970s by photographing graffiti murals on his way to work for a telephone company, then moved on to B-boy battles in clubs and rap concerts in community centers and concert halls. He became the go-to photographer for magazines like Word Up and Rap Masters, and a generation of young people grew up with Ernie’s pictures on their walls. He has published several books, including “Who Shot Ya,” and was the subject of “The Other Side of Hip-Hop,” an award-winning documentary.

Ernie grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, but ran away from home when he was a teenager. He hung around Greenwich Village and befriended the singer Richie Havens, who taught him about art. He spent six years in the Navy and then returned to New York, where he married and had a child. Though he worked as an analyst for the phone company, the graffiti murals he saw in Manhattan Valley led him to borrow a camera.

Read Full Article