SOPHIE BRAMLY (B. 1959)

Futura Diary

each signed, numbered, and dated in marker 'FUTURA # - Aun 27 Sophie Bramly' (on the reverse)

ultrasmooth prints

each: 5 1/10 x 7 1/10 inches (13.0 x 18.0 cm)

Executed in 1983. Printed in 2024. Unique.

PROVENANCE: 

Sophie Bramly, Paris

EXHIBITED: 

Arles, Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Au nom du nom

NOTES:

This rare photographic suite captures a full day spent with the legendary graffiti artist FUTURA as seen through the lens of Sophie Bramly, a documenter of New York’s downtown cultural explosion of the early 1980s. Shot in black-and-white, the 18 piece set moves fluidly from studio interiors to subway platforms, from anonymous brick walls to the famed FUN Gallery, where FUTURA is pictured with Keith Haring - an echo of the historic fusion between graffiti and gallery culture.

Sophie Bramly (b. 1959) is a French photographer, creative director, and media pioneer whose work has played a pivotal role in chronicling and shaping the early global narrative of hip-hop culture. Born in Tunisia and raised in Paris, Bramly moved to New York in 1981, where she embedded herself in the emerging hip-hop scene as both witness and documentarian. Over the next three years, she captured the culture’s underground vibrancy with unprecedented intimacy. Her photographs, taken in clubs, bedrooms, subway stations, and recording studios, remain among the most definitive visual records of hip-hop’s formative years.

Bramly’s camera is intimate, never voyeuristic. Her images chronicle not just a figure, but a mood: FUTURA in motion, FUTURA in thought, FUTURA as both witness and architect of an era where street met salon. From tagged stairwells to impromptu sidewalk portraits, the photographs distill the ethos of early hip-hop and punk. This is the downtown mythos in real time, before the canon was canonized. The prints were produced under the artist’s supervision at Processus, Paris, and mounted by the team at Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles.

Accompanied by signed certificate of authenticity.