HENRY CHALFANT is best known for his photography and film documentation of urban youth culture. His photographs of New York's subway paintings record over 550 ephemeral artworks that have long since vanished.  He has photographed hundreds of images of young people creating the various artistic genres of Hip Hop, DJs, B-boys, graffiti writers at work. Exhibits of his photos begin with the O.K. Harris Gallery, 1980, the Mudd Club in 1980, the landmark ‘New York-New Wave’ show at P.S. l in 1981, and continue to include The American Century, at the Whitney Museum, New York, 1999; Born in the Streets at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, 2010 and Art in the Streets at MOCA in Los Angeles in 2011; Language of the Wall, at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, 2014; The Bridges of Graffiti, at the Biennale di Venezia, 2015; Henry Chalfant: 1980, at the Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, 1915; Art is Not a Crime, at the Centro de Arte Tomas y Valiente, Madrid, 2018: Art vs Transit, at The Bronx Museum, 2019.      He has co-authored the definitive account of New York graffiti art, Subway Art (Holt Rinehart Winston, N.Y. 1984) and a sequel on the art form's world-wide diffusion, Spraycan Art (Thames and Hudson, 2008); Training Days with Sacha Jenkins (Thames and Hudson,  2015).

In 1983, Chalfant co-produced with director Tony Silver the PBS documentary, Style Wars, the highly considered documentary about Graffiti and Hip Hop culture.  He has continued to make documentary films about street culture and community life in New York City, including Flyin’ Cut Sleeves, with Rita Fecher, and From Mambo to Hip Hop, with City Lore in 2006, co-produced La Madrina:  The Savage Life of Lorine Padilla  in 2020 with Raquel Cepeda.