UNEASY Chuck D. White House

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.