Behind the Scenes of "Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop"
Soho House, House Notes, May 2019
"Contact High" author and curator Vikki Tobak shares the stories behind some of her favorite photos.
When culture journalist Vikki Tobak began compiling her photo book, Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop, she wanted to present more than just a collection of photos of famous rappers. Behind every album or magazine cover lies a deeper story. “Hip-hop now has an archive that’s over 40 years old, and many photographers’ stories have never been told,” Tobak says. “These photographers have seen artists in situations that no one else has,” she says.
The book, which was released last October to praise from The New York Times, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, includes photos and contact sheets from over 100 iconic hip-hop photoshoots, spanning 1979 through to present day. It also features behind-the-scenes anecdotes and essays by Fab 5 Freddy, Michael Gonzales, Young Guru, Bill Adler, Rhea L. Combs, DJ Premier and RZA.
This year, Tobak transformed the book into a 140-work photo exhibition at the Annenberg Space for Photography. Featuring creative direction by Fab 5 Freddy, the show is the first-ever museum-level retrospective of hip-hop. “Annenberg hosted a big retrospective capturing Rock and Roll’s history, called Who Shot Rock & Roll, a few years ago, and I think they realized that hip-hop is now our dominant, mainstream culture,” Tobak says. “It influences everything from politics to streetwear, so now is really the perfect moment for an exhibition like this.”
Next Friday, May 17, members of Soho House West Hollywood and Little Beach House Malibu can take a private tour of the exhibition, which is on display at Los Angeles’ Annenberg Space for Photography until August. Here, Tobak shares some behind-the-scenes anecdotes from five photos from the show:
Kool Herc and Tony Tone, Joe Conzo Jr., 1979
“This photo, by Joe Conzo Jr., kicks off the exhibit. Joe is the guy who took hip-hop’s baby pictures. He was in all of the clubs and the roller rinks, and he actually went to school with the Cold Crush Brothers, which is how he became a photographer. He picked up a camera, and he couldn’t rap or break or anything, so he was like, ‘I’m just gonna photograph you guys.’ He started in high school and you can see his contact sheets are a mess because he was figuring it out along the way. Most of his stuff is blurry or underexposed, but those one or two photos on the roll are just incredible. And this photo of Kool Herc and Tony Tone from the Cold Crush Brothers is one of those. Joe caught that photo in a club in 1979. He wasn’t even supposed to be inside there, but he had managed to sneak his way in with a camera. And on that contact sheet you see every element of the culture. You see the DJs, the faces, the clubs where hip-hop was being played and born and cultivated. You can see the real everydayness of what would become greatness.”
Salt-N-Pepa, Janette Beckman, 1987
“This Salt-N-Pepa photo is by Janette Beckman, who has a lot of work in the show. She was actually the first person I interviewed for the book. She’s incredible. She's from England originally, and started out photographing punk. When hip-hop first made its way over to London in the '80s, she says, she recognized that a lot of the things she was drawn to in punk — the whole counterculture movement and the speaking truth to power ethos — were present in hip-hop, too. This particular photo was taken on a Hasselblad in Janette's studio for one of Salt-N-Pepa’s singles (‘Shake Your Thang’). Janette tells this story of how they came in wearing these Dapper Dan jackets, and they just had this great sense of style. A lot of these shoots were not professionally styled by anyone. What you see is truly how they walked in off the street. The shoot has really come to symbolize these power poses and the powerful history of women in hip-hop.”
Jay Z, Jamil GS, 1995
“This is from Jay Z’s first press shoot with Jamil GS. To get to see an artist like Jay at the beginning of his career, with just a single on an indie label is really special. Jamil talks about what collaborating with him on what he was trying to convey. In these photos, you see him in front of the World Trade Center, in front of these yachts and signifiers of wealth and signatures of empire building. For an artist and a photographer to have that vision before he had even come out to the world is really telling.”
Nipsey Hussle, Jorge Peniche, 2011
“Jorge Peniche, who took this photo, was not just Nipsey's photographer — he was his longtime friend. Jorge's been documenting Nipsey since before Nipsey was really who he was. He is one of the rare young photographers who still shoots on film, pretty much exclusively. The contact sheets for this shoot show Nipsey with his daughter, and Jorge says that there was a moment when Nipsey was like, ‘I need to have photos of me not just associated with gang culture’ or whatever mass media was portraying him as. So Jorge took these really candid photos of Nipsey with his daughter pretending to drive in his lap, and it just shows a different side to him. When you see those photos, you're like, ‘Right, this person was a father. This person was an activist. This person was a part of their community.’ That's what a good photographer can really show with their photos.”
The Notorious B.I.G. ‘King of New York,’ Barron Claiborne, 1997
“This photo was originally on the cover of Rap Pages magazine. It’s in our collective consciousness now, like the hip-hop ‘Mona Lisa,’ but on the contact sheet you see a totally different side of the shoot. It’s really fun because there is one of him being goofy and smiling, and everyone who knew Biggie would always says, ‘that’s the guy that I knew.’ It’s interesting to think about the pictures that end up in magazines, because behind the scenes, for the photographers and people who knew the artists, it was often a different story.”