James Hamilton

James Hamilton (born 1946) is an American photographer, best known for his documentation of the New York City film, art and music scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

Life James Hamilton was born in Baltimore. Hamilton shot the photographs and Roger C. Sharpe authored the text. The book provides a detailed chronicle of pinball's rise and becoming of a national pastime, starting with its pre-war roots and tracing its history up to its ubiquity in now long-extinct bars, penny arcades, and coffee houses across the US and in Europe. Hamilton's color photographs of the machines themselves, as well as the places in which they lived and the people who played them, provides viewers with a time capsule of the pinball-crazed era of the mid-seventies.

In 2010, Hamilton published the monograph You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen with Ecstatic Peace Library (a division of Daydream Library), New York. The book revealed his vast archive of previously unpublished photography spanning four decades of the music scene. Containing over 300 black and white photographs, the book includes portrait sittings, performance shots, and reportage. The musicians pictured represent a wide variety of genres such as Duane Allman, Dolly Parton, Madonna, Eubie Blake, Charles Mingus, Joni Mitchell, Bing Crosby, Jerry Lee Lewis, Glenn Branca, The Ramones, Gil Scott-Heron, Laurie Anderson and Bob Marley. Also included are portraits of music critics like Robert Christgau, Legs McNeil and Nat Hentoff. Hamilton produced You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen in collaboration with Thurston Moore, whom he had photographed previously with Sonic Youth and served as the book's editor. The foreword is by Mark Jacobson. You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen received press from Vanity Fair, New Yorker and Another Magazine.