AM: How was it to have Fab 5 Freddy as a creative director with the book? VT: Oh my goodness, he’s a dream. He is a historian, he was a part of the culture, and he also gets this as part of the larger storytelling of Hiphop. As soon as I told him about this project, he got it right away. To be able to go deeper into these photos, he also realized there had never been a real retrospective done of Hiphop photography. Individual artists had sort of had little shows here and there but never on this kind of scale. So he not only wrote an essay for the book (which was incredible), he’s also in a lot of photos in the book.
And when it came time for me to curate the show’s exhibition, which we now have at the Annenberg Space For Photography in Los Angles through August 18 and which we hope to make a traveling exhibit after that, I knew he was the right person to be the creative director because he just got it – he got the whole project. We worked great together. He’s now working on so many amazing things related to the culture: He has a new film on Netflix called The Grass Is Greener about cannabis policy and the history of music in the black community. I like that he is a deeper, broader thinker – more than just about the music and more than just about the style. He sees how all the dots connect, which is why I really
