Joe Conzo: The Tito Puente of Photography

Ricky Powell: Washington Square Park, a little convo with Joe Conzo. Joe Conzo, in my mind…the epitome of the epitome of photographers, because you do it for the love. When did you start shooting?
Joe Conzo: Honestly, Ricky, I picked up the camera when I was in school at Columbia University. I went to a private school there from like kindergarten to third grade. I recently found my report card from 1972 that said, “Joey is excelling in photography,” so if that’s ’72—I was born in ’63—that makes me nine years old?
RP: “He can’t divide three into nine, but what an incredible photographer.”

Where’d you grow up?
JC: Born and raised in the South Bronx. I live up in the North Bronx now, the Norwood section. My heart and my roots are in the Bronx, Ricky. Born there, I’m gonna probably die there. I’ve seen the Bronx through its good times, bad times, and I love it. The Bronx is the epitome of what we call the melting pot of New York City—Black, Latino, Asian, Irish, Jewish, Siberian, Mexican…you name it. Everybody’s in the Bronx.


RP: How come you’re so nice?
JC: How come I’m so nice? I guess when you’ve been through my life experiences, nice is all there is to be. I’m an ex recovering drug addict. I’ve been clean 19 years. I was homeless at one time. I almost got killed in 9/11—my ambulance was the first ambulance from the Bronx to get downtown, and that was a humbling experience. Life is too short to be angry and pissed off.
RP: You are my new guru.
JC: [Laughs] Now, don’t get me wrong, I do get angry from time to time, but Ricky, listen, 18 years as a paramedic with the Fire Department, I’ve seen people’s lives cut short in an instant, from kids to adults, and it’s like, “How did you live your life?” I want to live my life as humble as I can and I’m a true believer that you should treat people the way you want to be treated.
RP: I hear that, but that’s why I’m always screaming. I try to come correct, and then some jerkoff—
JC: Then you know what, Ricky? Walk away. Fuck them. That’s it. It’s their loss.

RP: I saw some clips from the movie 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s.
JC: …Which was a documentary done in the ’70s about the gangs.
RP: Do you have footage in there that you shot?
JC: No, and I take that as a compliment. A lot of my work is indicative of that time period.
RP: What happens when you look at that movie?
JC: I look at 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s, I look at Style Wars, I look at From Mambo to Hip Hop, I look at all those documentaries from back then and I’m glad it was documented. I grew up in that era in the Bronx when the Bronx was burning. The way I like to say it, the Bronx was burnt. A lot of gangs, a lot of drugs.
RP: I’m sure you knew a lot of dudes that were in gangs. What do you think kept you from going in that direction?
JC: I had my little crews that I associated with, but nothing big like the Ghetto Brothers, the Savage Skulls, or any gangs of those types. I’m the grandson of the late Evelina Antonetty, who was called the Hell Lady of the Bronx. She could have been mayor of New York City. She’s responsible for bilingual education in the public schools. She’s responsible for the summer breakfast programs for inner-city kids. My playgrounds growing up were demonstrations against the Board of Ed, demonstrations against City Hall, demonstrations against movies like Fort Apache that depicted the Bronx as nothing but pimps, whores, prostitutes, and drug addicts. I guess that was my shield, so to speak.
RP: She was a huge influence on you?
JC: Oh, big time, and my mother continues my grandmother’s legacy, but I guess that’s what insulated me. My father’s an ex heroin addict. We used to get high together.
RP: I thought I was kooky for smoking joints with my mom.
JC: All my trials and tribulations, Ricky, made me who I am today.

RP: What does the name Tito Puente mean to you?
JC: Tito Puente is like my other father…my uncle.
RP: Oh my God!


JC: My dad was Tito Puente’s right-hand man, so when I wasn’t taking pictures of the guys I went to school with—the pillars of hip-hop like Tony Tone, AD, Bambaataa, Kool Herc and all those guys—I was hanging out with my dad in the ’70s, going to salsa concerts. Did you know that Tito Puente played on Sugar Hill Gang’s first album? People don’t know that shit. That’s how great that man was.
RP: I told you one time I took a leak next to him at Magique.
JC: I was probably in the other urinal, because I went to Magique a few times and shit [laughs]!
RP: I’ve seen film footage of him, the whole park jam thing, him bringing his orchestra into playgrounds.
JC: Central Park, 52 Park up in the Bronx. Here is a man—the King of Salsa, well known worldwide—who would walk into a park with no bodyguards, shake everybody’s hand, and sign autographs. You don’t see that today. You see these knuckleheads like Marc Anthony and all these guys with 50,000 bodyguards. Give me a fucking break.
RP: We’re lucky we caught the tail end of the ’70s. It was a different world we grew up in.
JC: Every time I speak to you, more and more, I see that our lives are parallel. The way I was with the Cold Crush Brothers is the way you were with Run-D.M.C.
RP: That’s a very interesting point. I was gonna ask you, what groups did you do some group shots for, either live or posed, because you were down with them?
JC: The majority of my hip-hop images are of the Cold Crush Brothers, because they took me under their wing. But through them I got
to meet Afrika Bambaataa and the Fearless Four, Kool Herc, the Treacherous Three…
RP: And where would you meet or go hang out?
JC: Either at the clubs or different shows. Harlem World was a very popular place back then.
RP: What was that club, the one that everyone used to go to in the Bronx?
JC: The Fever.
RP: Were you like a house photographer?
JC: Not a house photographer. I went when the Cold Crush were there, and I photographed their shows and stuff. That’s the only time I went. The Fever, the Ecstasy Garage, Skate Key, those were popular back then for shows.
RP: How about Roxy’s?
JC: Roxy’s was my hangout place.
RP: Friday nights?
JC: Friday nights.
RP: Whooa! Whaaat!?
JC: I’ll tell you a quick story. Run-D.M.C. opened up for the Cold Crush Brothers one time down there.
RP: No!
JC: Yes.
RP: No.
JC: Yes.
RP: Wow.
JC: When their hit, “It’s Like That,” just came out, it was Cold Crush and Run-D.M.C.
RP: Dude, you know what kind of juice I had there? I used to work at the 8th Street Playhouse movie theater. You remember it?
JC: Yeah, I saw Rocky Horror Show like 20 times there, tripping on acid and shit like that.
RP: You were one of them? Well I was the dude from the theater trying to keep people on the sidewalk beforehand. I used to bang the chick who dressed like Frankenfurter. I’d bring her to my house around the corner.

So anyway, this chick who used to work the ticket booth, Clara, she quit, and then she ended up being the ticket girl at Roxy’s in ’83. So I had mad juice, which was huge, to have juice at Roxy’s on a Friday night. I’d bring hippie chicks. They thought I was big willy. That was a real collection of scene right there—the downtown graffiti writers who were kinda cool, like DONDI, ZEPHYR, FUTURA, Keith Haring….

And then Danceteria, which was close to my house—I lived on Ninth and Fifth. I could walk up to Danceteria in my bathrobe if I wanted to.
JC: Remember the Starship?
RP: I had my little Latina crew from high school who used to take me there.
JC: I tell people I was into disco and got kidnapped by hip-hop. I was a disco head, going to Bond’s International and all those places.
RP: Oh, that club was huge. You could get lost in there.
JC: Yeah, and that’s what we did, we got lost—dropped some mescaline that we picked up on 116th Street on the way downtown.
RP: That’s the way to go out. I love your style!
JC: Dance all night, come out nine o’clock in the morning, go eat some breakfast, and go home…or go to work, because back then we used to go partying and go straight to work and shit.
RP: Oh my goodness.

What does the name Celia Cruz mean to you?
JC: Celia Cruz was like my titi.
RP: Your who?
JC: Titi is Spanish for “aunt.”
RP: Oh God, get out of here!
JC: All these people I grew up around.
RP: They’d be in your house and shit?
JC: I’d be in their house, and I’d be photographing them, again because of my dad’s relationship with Tito Puente.
RP: How’d they come up?
JC: They started in the music business around the same time in the early ’40s and ’50s. Celia was born and raised in Cuba, and she came over here. Tito grew up in Spanish Harlem, did a stint in the Navy, and went to Julliard. He was called a child prodigy at 13 years old, and it was just in that era where they put bands together—Machito, Tito Rodriguez and all those guys—and you could see them playing at the Palladium, any clubs here, up in the Catskills....
RP: That’s dope. I loved in Henry Chalfant’s Mambo to Hip Hop that it went into the little thing about the clubs hiring the band leaders. I thought that was interesting.


JC: When I met Henry for the first time about seven years ago in Crotona Park—
RP: Hold up. You just met Henry for the first time?
JC: I knew of him, and I followed his work, but I actually went up to him, showed my work to him, and he was like, “Wow.” It was Henry who started the snowball effect with my photography, because he was the first person to license an image from me for Mambo to Hip Hop. That started the snowball effect where MTV, VH1, and everybody and their mother started calling me for images.
RP: Let me just ask, if you saw my house, my room that I live in…I had an original slide on the table of the Beastie Boys from ’88, and there was a joint on it; it was being used as an ashtray. My shit is retarded in my house. How did you always keep negatives and slides in your house?
JC: Ricky, I didn’t. When I was dealing with my drug issues and being homeless, my mother kept my negatives. Her and Easy AD kept my work. If it wasn’t for them, you and I probably wouldn’t be sitting here.

I got tired of seeing my images in movies like CB4, in books like Yes Yes Y’all…
RP: How did that happen? She’d give them out?
JC: No. As a kid I was throwing my images out. That’s what the Cold Crush Brothers did at shows; we would throw images out.
RP: Ah, OK.
JC: So one day I got tired of seeing all my images appearing in all these books and movies—no photo credit, no fuckin’ compensation. Right after 9/11, doing two years of therapy, what pretty much came out of that was it wasn’t my time to go, and I still had a lot to share with the world. I got all my images back from my mother and AD and took control.
RP: It’s interesting that your photos from early in your life came back later in your life to propel you into another phase.
JC: Yeah. It’s destiny.
RP: You know what got me into photography, right?
JC: What?
RP: Spite.
JC: Spite?
RP: Yeah. I had a girlfriend that dissed me for a dude with tie-dye yoga pants, and I said, “I’m gonna make her sorry! I’m gonna take this camera she left at my house, and I’m gonna use it to become somebody.” That was part of it. I mean, I like taking pictures, but—
JC: So I guess you have her to thank, right?
RP: Sort of. It’s weird, but anyway, let me ask you this….
JC: I love your notes.
RP: I did this last night. I was dusted.
JC: You still smoke dust?
RP: No! It’s a figure of speech. Grass.

The first and only time I smoked dust was in Oakland. I was backstage in the bathroom with Russell Simmons and two freakazoids broke out a pin joint and we started smoking. I was like, “Oh, that shit don’t taste like….” Then Russell was like, “This is good shit!” He didn’t get dusted. Me, I started walking around in circles in front of Run-D.M.C. in the dressing room, and then I had to go shoot Public Enemy, and I remember walking into the arena. It was packed, it was dark, everyone was screaming—I thought I was in the middle of like a Black Power rally. I was like, “Oh, my God.”
JC: How did you hook up with Run-D.M.C.?
RP: Through the Beasties. I knew Ad-Rock. He was five years younger than me. In ’85 I went to their gig at Cat Club when they just got off tour with Madonna. I was like, “Let me go check out these kids.” And they blew me away. I loved it: the 808 bass drum, slinging beer, cursing, and then I started hanging with them.

JC: Do you think us photographers get the respect we should get?
RP: Yeah, you know, it comes in different, weird ways. I like it when I get a waiter or a bartender who knows who I am and throws me a freebie.
JC: Yeah. That’s nice. What I try and tell people is, “You love this culture so much, but imagine this culture with your eyes closed. What do you see? Nothing. Open your eyes. That’s what we bring.” I’m just tired of people stealing my work. All you gotta do is ask.
RP: Common courtesy.
JC: Exactly. I’m one of the easiest people to find. Why the fuck would you want to take something that doesn’t belong to you to make profit?
RP: I can’t put it any simpler.

You are one of the class acts of photography, of New York City, and that’s it. I just wanted to put you in this time capsule.
JC: Thank you.