IN 1983, THE PHOTOGRAPHER and jewelry designer Coreen Simpson began going once a week to the Roxy, a beating heart of New York City’s downtown nightlife, where, on select nights, hip-hop music fresh from the Bronx pulsed and throbbed. Simpson, then a forty-one-year-old working mother, was far from a regular. She had recently taken a picture of two young men in fedoras who had caught her eye on the subway, and her daughter had suggested she visit the Roxy, thinking she might find it fertile ground for her portraiture work.
Inside the club, Simpson set up a small makeshift studio. Her boyfriend at the time, the artist George Mingo, came along to watch her equipment while Simpson scouted the dance floor for subjects. On and off, over several years, she photographed whoever caught her eye. Young and fierce, these “kids,” as Simpson called them, were always impeccably dressed, sometimes in fedoras and suits adorned with chains, or in fur caps and large hoop earrings.
Rendered in black and white, they look out of time, like gods and goddesses from antiquity, their faces serious and unsmiling, the glory of their youth and beauty undeniable. “I didn’t want to make anything trendy, I wanted to capture their style like a photographer. I wanted it magazine, a publication devoted to photography, a few years later under the series title . Over the following decades, her photographs appeared in various magazines and newspapers as well as in several exhibitions.
