![]() Biggie sits at the center of the room, and, at times, his face looks solemn-not a look of doubt, but a seriousness you’re not expecting in such a joyous setting. Surely, this album will secure his status as an all-time great. ![]() They are there for a listening session of “Life After Death.” Well-wishers laugh, sip Moët & Chandon, and pay their respects to the Brooklyn rapper. Biggie holds court at Daddy’s House, a studio in Hell’s Kitchen that his friend and producer Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, opened in the nineties. Among the most famous images of Kwon’s career are the ones she took of the Notorious B.I.G. There are shots in defunct record stores, closeups of once-revolutionary devices that seem hilariously quaint, behind-the-scenes glimpses of video shoots that seem to require much more labor than nowadays. Kool DJ Red Alert in a radio broadcast station, looking frazzled but energized, surrounded by twelve-inch singles and carts, trying to figure out what to play next. A sheet of paper on a mixing board, where the rapper and producer Pete Rock lists all the presets for the tracks he is fine-tuning. Looking at Kwon’s photographs, my eye was drawn to the details that root her subjects in the past. Smartphones and laptops have streamlined the process of making and distributing images, as well as music. The photographer was trying to catch the artist as stoic and powerful, not as someone puzzling for novel answers to my generic questions. On occasion, it could feel like the writer and photographer were telling two different stories, and we each had a limited amount of time to get what we needed. ![]() “Rap Is Risen” brought back a lot of personal memories of my early days as a journalist, in the late nineties and early two-thousands, interviewing up-and-coming rappers or d.j.s for music magazines, sometimes tagging along for photo shoots. Shot from below, Cypress Hill are flanked by skyscrapers they look as sturdy and immovable as their surroundings. Organized Konfusion’s bluejeans and brown boots perfectly match the speckled concrete slab that the two rappers sit atop, the endless, possibility-rich sky behind them. The Beastie Boys huddle together on a Lower East Side rooftop, looking as if they haven’t seen the sun in ages, their faces fading into the gray clouds. Kwon’s compositional sense is breathtaking. There are the pictures for magazines or promotional material, demanding a larger-than-life grandeur. “Rap Is Risen,” which was published in November, captures hip-hop in various poses-public and private. The implicit argument was that everyone represented the city in their own way. In 2009, Kwon published “ Street Level: New York Photographs 1987-2007,” which placed images of well-known rappers, such as Mobb Deep or Jay-Z, alongside everyday New Yorkers. Images of rappers looking supreme and regal-think EPMD lounging on the set of the “Gold Digger” video-are as memorable as ones of them cradling their children or making goofy faces. “ Rap Is Risen: New York Photographs 1988-2008” (Testify Books) is a long-overdue survey of her hip-hop photography. Most importantly, Kwon’s subjects entrusted her to tell their whole stories.
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