On September 29, 1998, 177 hip hop artists, producers, and influencers gathered at 17 East 126th Street in Harlem to pose for what would become one of the music industry’s most iconic photographs. A Great Day in Hip Hop, first published on the cover of issue no. 7 of XXL magazine, was Gordon Parks’s homage to Art Kane’s 1958 photograph of 57 jazz musicians spilling off the same Harlem brownstone stoop for Esquire magazine. Since the Harlem Renaissance, the neighborhood had been a notable center of the uniquely American sound of jazz. His photograph—commonly referred to as A Great Day in Harlem—ingrained itself in our collective memory, epitomizing the “golden age” of jazz and Harlem.

The 1998 shoot was in fact Parks’s second visit to that iconic brownstone. In 1995, Life magazine commissioned Gordon Parks to photograph 10 of the 12 surviving participants of Art Kane’s photograph Golden Age of Jazz (1958) where they stood nearly 40 years earlier at 17 East 126th Street. In the moving image, the boarded up and roofless shell of the brownstone emphasized the absent musicians who had died.