To celebrate the thirty years of portraits in UNEASY I’m going to do 30 days of posts related to the book and it’s subjects. Today, appropriately, I tell the story of how we came to crucify Chuck D. of Public Enemy on the White House fence in 1991.
A line in a Public Enemy song talks about being crucified like Jesus, and we’re shooting in a hotel room in central D.C., so I suggest, “Let’s go shoot at the White House.”
We walked over, and I shot the whole band first, and then I said, “Chuck, I want to shoot you alone, as if you’re being crucified on the fence.” He looked at me suspiciously and said, “I’ll give you 15 seconds”—and then started counting. I had to edit to the frames where his mouth was closed, because he was actually counting out loud.