They appear in thousands of rap videos and are almost never named. Brian Finke’s Hip Hop Honeys, published by powerHouse Books in 2018, takes that contradiction as its starting point: the women who signal status for the men in the frame, and whom the frame rarely asks to identify themselves.

Finke spent three years around music-video shoots, largely backstage and between takes, learning the routines of people who arrive early, wait, perform and leave. The photographs sit within his established mode of robust, direct portraiture rather than reportage or fashion. What he records is work: the dressing room, the parking lot, the long pauses that the finished three-minute video edits away.

The book’s title poses a question instead of settling one. Are these women honeys, vixens, models, dancers? Revered, over-sexualised, demeaned, empowered? Stars or set pieces? By giving them the foreground and letting the rappers recede into the background, Finke inverts the grammar of the videos he documents, and the inversion is the argument.

For a collector, the case rests less on scarcity than on position. Hip Hop Honeys extends powerHouse Books’ long engagement with music and street culture, and it belongs to a body of work Finke has also presented as a gallery series, so the book reads as one iteration of a sustained project rather than a one-off. At ninety-two pages in a square hardcover, it is a compact and coherent statement about who gets photographed and who gets named — a question that has only grown more contested since publication.