A native of Los Angeles’s Westside, Estevan Oriol (b. 1967, Los Angeles) worked as a bouncer at several local hip-hop clubs in the late 1980s. After befriending rising local music stars Cypress Hill and House of Pain, he began traveling with the bands as tour manager in 1992 and documenting his experience in photographs. About the same time, he met a fellow lowrider car aficionado who went by the name Mister Cartoon, and by 1995 the two were business partners in the apparel line Joker Brand Clothing. As the line grew more successful and Oriol began to direct videos for musicians such as Cypress Hill, Xzibit, Eminem, and Blink-182, he and Cartoon expanded their partnership as part of SA (Soul Assassins) Studios, working across a broad range of disciplines, including feature films, commercials, music, fine art, and fashion. As a photographer, Oriol largely works with film and classic cameras, such as the Pentax 67, to create high-contrast black-and-white and color-saturated images. Although Oriol has photographed many international subjects, such as Tokyo Bosozoku motorcycle gangs and favela life in Brazil, he and his work are decidedly Angeleno, and his portraits of Los Angeles’s women, musicians, lowrider cars, Cholos, gang members, graffiti writers, and other characters provide a unique record of the city’s street culture over the past twenty years.
Art in the Streets, the first major historical exhibition of graffiti and street art organized by an American museum, surveys the origins and history of the movement in the United States and traces its influence as it spread around the world. Privacy Policy