Creative Finalist

Shot throughout 2025, The Palm, On Piru documents G-Funk and Gangster Rap artists across Piru and Blood-affiliated neighbourhoods in South Central Los Angeles, Compton, Carson, and Inglewood, offering a visual study of the communities foundational to West Coast Hip Hop and Southern California’s parallel gang culture. Tracing a lineage from the rise of the Crips and the Piru Street Boys to the formation of the Bloods - and the emergence of Gangster Rap - the series situates contemporary voices within a broader cultural history that continues to shape global rap music. Photographed on infrared film, the work renders the red and pink spectrum as aesthetic and symbolic language, illuminating themes of collective identity, spirituality, place, and the enduring legacy of the ‘Red’ side of West Coast Hip Hop and Rap.

Ben Brooks is a South London-based photographer whose character-driven work explores the people and culture shaping the contemporary rap music scenes of the UK and USA. He has been awarded in the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize (2023) and the BJP Portrait of Britain (2020, 2021).