Chalfant is a graduate of
Stanford University, where he majored in classical
Greek. Starting out as a sculptor in
New York City in the 1970s, Chalfant turned to photography and film to do an in-depth study of hip-hop culture and graffiti art. One of the foremost authorities on New York subway art, and other aspects of urban youth culture, his photographs record hundreds of ephemeral, original art works that have long since vanished. His photographs have appeared in exhibitions of graffiti art from its early appearances in
New York/New Wave at
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center to retrospectives such as
Art in the Streets at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and
City as Canvas: Graffiti Art From the Martin Wong Collection at the
Museum of the City of New York, in addition to galleries and museums in the United States, Europe, and Asia. In 1983, Chalfant co-produced the
PBS documentary
Style Wars, the seminal documentary about graffiti and hip hop culture. Among Chalfant's other films are ''Flyin' Cut Sleeves
, a documentary about Bronx street gang leaders in the 1970s and Visit Palestine: Ten Days on the West Bank
, based on his visit to the occupied territories in 2000. His 2006 documentary From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale'' chronicles two generations who grew up on the same blocks of the Bronx, NY, using rhythm as their form of rebellion—for the older generation of the 1950s it was the
rhythms of Cuba; for their children of the 1970s it was the rhythms of rap. The film was featured in the
Latino Public Broadcasting series Voces in 2006-2007, and won an
Alma Award for Best Documentary. He has co-authored an account of
New York graffiti art,
Subway Art, and a sequel on the art form's worldwide diffusion,
Spraycan Art. Chalfant has stated his influences are varied: "In college my mentor was Charles Rowan Beye, the Greek scholar. I really didn't have a mentor for my art work, but I was influenced by great sculptors I admired like
David Smith and
Eduardo Chillida. For visual
anthropology, I was influenced by the ethnographic filmmaker,
Jean Rouch." Chalfant continues to preserve and archive past work, make documentary films, and mentor other filmmakers' work through Public Art Films, a non-profit organization "dedicated to producing films and videos about grassroots cultural expressions." ==''Henry Chalfant's Big Subway Archive''==