Now and Then NYC is a photography campaign produced in 2026 by Pro-Keds in collaboration with Jamel Shabazz — photographer, documentarian, and witness to New York urban culture.
There's a New York that never makes it onto mood boards. The one with playgrounds at six in the morning, subway lines cutting through neighborhoods like borders, bodegas that never close. A city that doesn't need to be photographed perfectly — just honestly.
Now and Then: NYC starts here. And with Jamel Shabazz.
Jamel Shabazz: Memory in Motion
In 1980, Jamel Shabazz returned to Brooklyn after serving in the military. Twenty years old, a 35mm camera in hand. He wasn’t after stolen shots — before raising his camera, he built trust with the people he photographed. A method that turned every image into a shared act of authorship.
For years he documented what fashion only figured out later: that on the streets of Harlem, Queens, and Brooklyn, something powerful was being built — an aesthetic that was original, political, unmistakable.
Back in the Days, published in 2001, is the best-known work from this period. It covers the decade 1980–1989 — the years hip-hop culture was taking shape before it became an industry. Shabazz recorded it not as a chronicler, but as part of the movement.
A Return, Not a Beginning
Pro-Keds was already present in Shabazz’s frames before any collaboration existed. In the early ’80s, across the blocks of New York, those sneakers were part of the visual language he moved through every day — a natural presence, never staged.
The brand started in 1949 on the basketball court, but the street wrote its longest chapter. Working with Shabazz — then as now — didn’t mean building a new visual world. It meant returning to one that was already there.
Pro-Keds and Jamel Shabazz: the First Campaign
Alongside that organic presence, there had also been an official chapter: a campaign shoot that Shabazz remembers as his first major professional break.
He was given full creative control: choosing the models, incorporating garments he had designed himself, and building a visual world rooted entirely in the 1970s. A process that turned the set into something closer to a community act than a straightforward advertising production.
Now and Then: NYC, Jamel Shabazz for Pro-Keds
In 2026, Pro-Keds steps back into Jamel Shabazz's frame with Now and Then: NYC.
The shoot is a way of reading time. On one side, the archive Shabazz built over decades on the street. On the other, the city today. The thread holds even as New York changes — new faces, changing geographies, but the same sense of belonging and the same energy as forty years ago. Not nostalgia. A conversation between two eras that still speak the same language.
The city doesn't stay in the background here. It's part of the story — a network of places where culture takes shape because people actually live there, where style is still a form of showing up. Sneakers, now as then, enter the frame as a mark of belonging: the unwritten uniform of those who recognize themselves in a New York that never poses.
Consistent with Shabazz's approach, the direction is documentary. Spontaneous images, real atmosphere, nothing forced. The warm analog color grading and black-and-white treatment on select photographs aren't decorative choices — they keep past and present in the same frame.
A Community That Recognizes Itself
On the set of Now and Then: NYC, people showed up from different generations, backgrounds, and styles. Some already close to the Pro-Keds universe, others encountering the brand for the first time. But something clicked: not just a group of people in front of a camera, but a real community, formed in the shared space of the street.
For Shabazz, it’s the group shot that carries the most weight. An iconic photograph is one that can bring together strangers and make them a single image — not for how it looks, but for what it reveals: that community isn’t built, it’s recognized.
This is where Pro-Keds finds its most authentic identity: in the people who wear it, in the places they move through, in the codes they share.
That’s why this encounter with Shabazz doesn’t feel like a collaboration. It feels like coming home. Shabazz documents the street from the inside, with the eye of someone who knows its language; Pro-Keds has been carrying that same street for decades.
Shabazz turns the present into memory. Pro-Keds is a memory that keeps walking. Together, they tell New York the only way worth telling it: honestly, without filters.