THE EXHIBITION

FLY HIGH

Redman — Brooklyn, NYC

We climbed to the top of a Brooklyn rooftop in the dead of winter — Redman's idea. He wanted to shoot somewhere that felt like freedom, somewhere up above all the noise. The sky was the color of dirty dishwater, flat and heavy, the kind of overcast that makes a color photograph feel more like a memory. He spread his arms like he was about to take off. His jacket caught the wind. I backed up as far as the roof would allow and framed him against the grey expanse of sky and rooftop — the TV antenna behind him looked like a launching pad. What I love about this shot is what it says without saying it. Redman was never about spectacle. He was about truth. And here, on a frozen rooftop with nowhere to be, he looked completely free. That's the story of rap in 1996 — when artists still had the freedom to be exactly who they were, in exactly the moments they chose. I shot three rolls that afternoon. This frame was the third shot on the second roll.

CLEAN DIRTY

ODB as Big Daddy Kane

Nobody understood Ol' Dirty Bastard the way the camera did. The world saw chaos — the press, the industry, even some in his own circle. But through the lens, you saw something different: a man with a complete, singular vision of himself. This was a concept shoot — ODB stepping into the character of Big Daddy Kane, a nod to the lineage, the hat, the car, the cool. He sat in that driver's seat like he'd been there his whole life, hat tilted, looking out past me with an expression I can only describe as regal indifference. I pressed my eye to the Leica finder and held my breath. He wasn't looking at me — he was looking through me, out at something only he could see. The window frame created a natural portrait, the trees soft behind him, the steering wheel completing the composition. ODB is gone now, and that loss is immeasurable. But in this frame — in this single frame — he is exactly who he always was. Completely himself, dressed as someone else, yet more authentically ODB than anything you could have planned.

SCREAM

Old Dirty Bastard aka O.D.B — Long Island

ODB opened his mouth and the whole world came out. This was Long Island, 1995. Wu-Tang was already a movement, already a mythology in the making. ODB was its most unpredictable, most human, most cosmically chaotic force. Nobody performed like him. Nobody existed like him. I pushed the Tri-X to 1600 that night because the light was terrible and I refused to miss this. The grain in this photograph is not a flaw — it is the photograph. That granular texture in the blacks, the way the Wu-Wear logo blooms slightly in the high contrast — it's the sound of that room, made visible. He was mid-scream when I pressed the shutter. Eyes closed or nearly closed. Head tilted back. Mouth wide open as if he was trying to swallow the room, or let the room swallow him. It was the purest performance I have ever photographed. I carry this frame with me everywhere. It is proof that some people burn differently than the rest of us — brighter, faster, hotter. Russell Tyrone Jones was one of those people. And for one instant in Long Island, he let me photograph his fire.

YOUNG RUN

Joseph 'Run' Simmons of Run-DMC — Queens, NYC

This is the alley behind the Hollis block where it all started. Joseph Simmons — Run — was barely old enough to drive when this frame was made. Black fedora pulled low, leather jacket, leaning against the same brick wall he'd tagged as a kid. He looked straight into my lens the way he looked at everything back then: steady, certain, like he already knew what was coming and was just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. And what was coming was Run-DMC. Run, his brother Russell's kid from around the way Darryl McDaniels — DMC — and a DJ named Jason Mizell who everyone called Jam Master Jay. Three kids out of Hollis, Queens, who did something nobody had done before: they took hip-hop out of the parks and the clubs and put it on stadium stages, on MTV, on the cover of Rolling Stone. They were the first rap act to go gold, the first to go platinum, the first to earn a Grammy nomination, the first to sign an endorsement deal with a major brand — those Adidas shell-toes weren't a fashion choice, they were a cultural contract. Before them, hip-hop was a New York thing. After them, it was a worldwide language. "King of Rock" said it plainly — they weren't asking permission from rock and roll. They were claiming the throne. Then "Raising Hell" in 1986, and that collaboration with Aerosmith on "Walk This Way" — a record that broke hip-hop through to the mainstream the way nothing else could have. Run didn't perform that song. He walked through it. That was always his gift: the calm at the center of a storm he'd helped create. What people forget about Run is how young he was when the weight of it landed. He was a teenager carrying a movement. Russell, his older brother, built Def Jam around him and LL Cool J, but Run was the face — the voice that millions of kids across the planet first heard rap through. Every bar he laid in those early years was a brick in the foundation of an entire culture. And Jay — Jam Master Jay — was the engine. The turntables, the cuts, the silence between the screams. Jay held it down from the back of the stage and never once asked for the front. He was murdered in his studio in 2002, and the case is still a wound that Queens carries every single day. I shot this in the alley because Run wanted to shoot where he was from, not where he'd ended up. "Take me home," he said. So we went to Hollis, to the alley, to the wall with the names — Frankie, Marie, Youth — written in chalk that's probably still fading somewhere under thirty years of paint and weather. He stood there in his fedora and leather, and for a second he wasn't the King of Rock. He was just a kid from Queens who'd gotten lucky enough to be exactly where the world was listening. I pressed the shutter once. That was the whole frame. This is the story behind the photo: three boys from Hollis built the house that hip-hop still lives in. Run was the youngest of them, and somehow he carried the most. This is him before the stadiums, before the Grammys, before the loss — young, certain, and already golden.

REDMAN SMILE

Story coming soon.

ODB FACE

Story coming soon.

BACK AT YOU

Mobb Deep — Signed by Havoc

BACK AT YOU — signed by Havoc himself, in his own hand, across the top of this print. Mobb Deep were kids from Queensbridge Houses when the world first heard them — Albert Johnson, who everyone called Prodigy, and Kejuan Muchita, who became Havoc. Two teenagers from the largest public housing project in North America decided they were going to make the bleakest, most precise, most unrelenting rap music anybody had ever heard, and then they did it. "The Infamous" dropped in 1995 and rewrote what a hip-hop record could feel like. "Shook Ones (Part II)" alone is a whole curriculum — Havoc's cold piano loop, Prodigy's calm menace on the mic. Nobody had ever rapped like Prodigy rapped on that album: quiet, surgical, every word a threat delivered at room temperature. And Havoc's production — he was barely old enough to vote — built the sound that an entire generation of New York rap would be measured against for the next decade. This photograph was made on a block in Queensbridge, late, in the back of somebody's car. Prodigy had the do-rag on, eyes low. Havoc leaned in from the passenger side and looked straight down the lens — that look he had, half kid, half architect, already knowing he'd built something the city couldn't take back. I shot it on Tri-X, pushed, because there was no light and there was never going to be enough light in that backseat. The grain is the photograph. The window glass fractured the focus just enough to make it feel like a memory instead of a portrait. Years later Havoc signed it. "Back at You" — the title, and the answer. Queensbridge sent the message out, and the message came back. Prodigy is gone now, taken too young in 2017, and the weight of that sits in this frame every time I look at it. But Havoc's signature is still there, right where he put it, in ink that isn't going anywhere. This is what the Archive is for. Not the moment the world noticed. The moment before — two kids from Queensbridge, in a car, in the dark, already immortal.