In Sue Kwon’s photographs, rappers and d.j.s are imperious one moment, vulnerable and down-to-earth the next, never far from the neighborhoods that made them.
, alongside everyday New Yorkers. The implicit argument was that everyone represented the city in their own way. “Rap Is Risen,” which was published in November, captures hip-hop in various poses—public and private. There are the pictures for magazines or promotional material, demanding a larger-than-life grandeur. Kwon’s compositional sense is breathtaking.
There’s a casualness to these images, suggestions that Kwon was a part of the scene, not a disturbance. She was raised in New Haven, the third and youngest child of Korean immigrants. She arrived in Manhattan in the eighties, a time when hip-hop was slowly taking over the city. The epicenters of this world-changing music were hidden in plain sight: side-street restaurants where the best d.j.s in the world would play weeknight after-hours parties, record labels run out of co-working spaces and P.
We’ve become inured to the storytelling power of images, and also to the labor it once required to get a perfect shot. Back then, intimacy was something to be earned, not given away online. Artists saw no point in appearing vulnerable. Kwon abetted the mythmaking of hip-hop stars, but she was allowed to show them candidly as normal people, too, and we feel lucky for these glimpses of our heroes doing everyday things.
and Havoc of Mobb Deep. Big Noyd, who never sounded particularly genial on wax, grinning with his daughter.“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.
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. Among the most famous images of Kwon’s career are the ones she took of the Notorious B.I.G. less than two weeks before his death. 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.
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