"This documentary details the life,struggles,politics and work of longtime Hip Hop Photo Activist Brother Ernie Paniccioli. Brother Ernie has been covering the Hip Hop culture since the early 1970's. Starting in a time when it was not fashionable to shoot Hip Hop Artists Brother Ernie would eventually shoot everyone from Grandmaster Flash to Little Bow Wow. Now his story is being told for the greater public to see." Source

Ernie is a 62 year old Native American, Buddhist an honorary member of the Black Panthers, a member of the Nation of Islam and is on the world council of the Zulu Nation. I would have needed a week to do the research to even begin to have been prepared do an interview with him and even then I would only have sounded more foolish.

So in the end I had no defences to fall back on as this richly enigmatic character continued unprompted with a fascinating and inciteful talk that brought in the English standing stones, CCTV cameras, David Icke, Malcolm X the nature of the printed media and societies present fascination for all things shallow.  By the time he had left I felt very humble indeed.

This ends up more of a nice chat than an interview but a truly fascinating character, The Writing on the Wall festival had wanted to get hold of Ernie to do talk for them so it would be great to get him over again to Liverpool to do a talk next year.

All of Ernie's work is available to order online - and there is a fascinating collection of them here on Lulu.com Take a look

A big thank you to Mike Badger and most of all to Ernie for giving up his time for this recording.

Myspace Ernie: http://www.myspace.com/ernie_paniccioli