Vikki Tobak spoke to the people behind classic hip-hop portraits, from Salt-N-Pepa to Jay-Z
Main image: Hip-hop royalty … Biggie Smalls, featured in the exhibition Contact High. Photograph: Barron Claiborne
Wed 7 Nov 2018 07.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 26 Mar 2020 14.30 GMT
Tyler, the Creator, aged 20, in Los Angeles, 2011
Photographed by Jorge Peniche. Tyler came to fame as the leader of the west coast collective Odd Future. Lyrics written for the group prompted a still-upheld ban on his entry to the UK for ‘posing a threat to public order’. Vikki Tobak’s book Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop is published by Penguin Random House
Photographer Jorge Peniche says: ‘We linked up in Pan-Pacific Park in LA. There was a solid white wall on the street and he gave me all these great expressions, I didn’t force them out of him. Tyler comes from a generation where visuals are so integral to everything he does. Even when he started with Odd Future, he was designing the group’s clothing and thinking a lot about the relationship between music and visuals’
Says photographer Janette Beckman: ‘I met Salt-N-Pepa long before they made their first record. They were like sisters; funny, cool girls from Queens wearing big gold earrings and chains with fake Louis Vuitton bags’
Beckman adds: ‘On the day of the shoot, they came wearing leather baseball jackets created by the one and only Dapper Dan, with kente cloth hats, spandex and gold dookie-rope chains. They used fashion to express their strength and femininity. Dapper Dan’s creations turned up in many of my photos of hip-hop artists’
Photographer Armen Djerrahian says: ‘This pose with the diamond symbol was synonymous with the Roc-A-Fella family and has become one of my best-known shots. But when Jay threw the sign initially, I was almost annoyed because it hid most of his face’
Djerrahian adds: ‘I was using my Nikon F4 with Polagraph film, which is a very special type of film made by Polaroid that allows you to create a black-and-white slide’
Photographer Eric Coleman says: ‘I met Doom first as “Dumile”, the person, not the rapper, and was like, “OK, this is what he looks like.” When Doom put on the mask, things became surreal. Suddenly, I was photographing a mask and not the person; the guy behind it almost didn’t matter’
Jeff Jank adds: ‘Doom seemed so obscure then; no photos, albums under different names, his records in and out of print. He and Madlib were both like the anti–pop star. If there was ever a chance to try and define someone with an image, this was it’
Photographer Al Pereira: ‘I believe the artist’s ideas inform their image, so I love collaboration. It was actually her idea to do the smoking gun kind of pose. She did all the heavy lifting with that shot and really brought power to it. She was the Queen in command’
Pereira says: ‘I shot this on the set of the Fly Girl video with a Pentax 645 Medium 2¼-in negative using a manual focus with a 75mm/2.8 lens. Latifah’s mom was a big part of her career and made sure Dana (that’s what I called her) was always above board’
Photographer Phil Knott says: ‘When I was hired to shoot Rocky’s album cover, I decided it was important to shoot with him in his neighbourhood in Harlem’
Knott adds: ‘On the day of the shoot, Rocky showed up with the flag and we moved over to a nearby studio to get the cover photo, which I shot with a Canon 5D. I didn’t think anything of him bringing the flag. We shot it upside down to signify a state of unrest’
Photographer Danny Clinch says: ‘Kanye was someone who clearly had a vision for what he wanted. By the time I did the cover of this album, I had already done a lot of classic covers and knew how to respect an artist’s vision’
Clinch adds: ‘His style was just really unique, not typical of other hip-hop visuals at the time. He envisioned a high school yearbook theme. I got the sense that he really wanted to take a chance with this debut’
Says photographer Barron Claiborne: ‘The symbolism of the crown was meant to convey greatness and something bigger about hip-hop and this man who had made it to the top of his game’
Claiborne: ‘A few days after Biggie died, someone called to tell me that the image was being carried through Biggie’s funeral procession in Brooklyn. That was meaningful to me. When people die young, as Biggie did, they are mythologised through imagery. As a photographer, to have a photo that everybody knows is rare’
