It was 1981 when the Tunisia-born, Paris-raised Sophie Bramly moved to New York City. Bramly was in love with two things—photography and change—and in New York in the early 80s she found both in the hip-hop that spilled out of spray-painted subways and into the taste-making clubs of downtown. “[I wanted to] be in NYC,” Bramly writes in the coffee-table book Yo! The Early Days of Hip Hop, 1982–84, “where back then life seemed to be even more full of constant upheaval than in London or Paris.” And what could have been more of an upheaval to witness than the arrival of the next great wave of music? Bramly was there, camera in hand for all of it, documenting the faces and the places and the sights and the sounds of the people who helped hip-hop break out from the broken blocks of the Bronx and into the world. —Alex Oliveira