A 90’s Girl Rediscovering Hip Hop Photography
Traci Bartlow aka “B-Love" could be described renaissance woman: dancer, choreographer, model, photographer and more recently, guest house host. She moved to New York from the Bay Area as a teenager to pursue dance with a scholarship to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. While on the East Coast she explored all forms of dance and became a model, where she was exposed to photography. As a budding photographer and dancer in New York and the Bay Area in the 90’s she witnessed and captured the early days of hip hop. “When I was home in California at all the live shows, all the hip hop parties - these are things I was going to be at anyway because I'm just a part of that culture. And so I carried my camera with me everywhere. And I captured the essence of the scene,” says Bartlow.
Though she pursued a career as a guest house operator and emmy award winning dancer and cultural archivist, she felt drawn to the work she captured as a young woman. As her guest house opened in Oakland, she decided to archive and curate her photography work and put on an exhibit in the space in 2022 : Oakland Picture Lady: Tales of a 90's Girl. After her exhibition, the work was exhibited at National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, Tennessee in 2023. Now at 59, she is curating a photo book of her work capturing a pivotal era in music and hip hop.
“It's like all these different pieces, without me really planning them, they all came into alignment, just as I was following my intuition and following my heart… and sometimes it was just flowing with what life gave me,” says Bartlow.
