Zach Wolfe on Alfamega:

This shot is front of the Hilliard Street [Residence] Hotel, which is off of Auburn Avenue and Edgewood Street, downtown [in Atlanta]. It’s abandoned now and completely boarded up; it was in the process of being shut down at that point. The nickname on street is Pink City—crackhouse, whorehouse, pretty much one of the hardest spots in downtown Atlanta. The video I did with Pill is right in that area—not “Trap Goin’ Ham;” I did “Glass,” the black and white one right after that. They came after me to do that video right after “Trap Goin’ Ham” came out. They were like, “We want to shoot in the same area.” I was like, The only way I can do it without looking like I’m biting these other guys is if I shoot it black and white. So I just did a real grittier black and white play on that video. That was my first video that got to MTV. That was pretty cool.

Anyway, this shot right here: the day before the album cover shoot—which his album never came out—we were scouting and I showed up to the hotel before him. I pulled into the parking lot and a couple of guys came out and started yelling at me. They were like, “You need to get out of here or we’re gonna put something in you.” I was like, Whoa. They kept saying it over and over: We’re gonna put something in you. I was like, “I get it, I get it.” They’re like, “We’re gonna steal your camera, man. You’re done.” They had me trapped in the parking lot. I was by myself. I was like, This is it. These guys are dead serious. I see Alfamega pull up in his Dodge Ram and he could see from, like 30 yards away that I was like, C’mon dude, get out of your truck and help me out.

He gets out of his truck and starts screaming, “You got a problem with Zack, you got a problem with me! It’s going down!” He runs up the stairs—Alfamega’s not a small dude—and just gets in these dudes faces, starts spitting at them and basically like two minutes later everything was cool.

The next day, I convinced the label to go shoot there—without telling them that story—knowing Alfamega said, It’s all good now, they’re all clear. But, even on this shot right here, these two guys, apparently after I shot this shot right here, went up to him and they were like, “We’re gonna steal his camera. You gotta tell him if he shoots one more shot of us, we’re gonna take his camera and all his gear.” [Alfamega] came up to me and he was like, “I’m not gonna stop them. So I suggest you stop shooting me with those dudes in the background.”

I’d say a month later that place shut down, so I feel lucky that I got to cover that hotel before it was gone. I was definitely not the first person to shoot there, but probably the first person to shoot here with Octobanks and go in there pretty deep.

More Alfamega x Zach Wolfe here.

Zach Wolfe on Gucci Mane:

This was my first time shooting Gucci—my first time meeting him, all that. There was a lot of buzz around him in Atlanta at the time; an insane amount—anywhere you drove around in Atlanta you would hear Gucci being bumped in the cars. Two years ago, at that time it was just like “Guccimania,” so it was exciting to get a chance to finally shoot him. It was Gucci Mane, Shawty Lo, OJ da Juiceman and Soulja Boy [for the cover of XXL Magazine]. That was a real stressful week because no one knew how to get all four of those guys together at one point in time. It basically came down to us to having 30 minutes with all four of them and [XXL] wanted two cover options, two 2-page spread options and solos. I’m like, It’s not possible. You’re killing me. We ended up doing the whole shoot in 23 minutes, it was crazy. I’ve never in my life been tested like that. It was a 90 degrees, dead summer day, there were entourages—entourages had entourages—it was ridiculous.

The cool story about Gucci was that we were setting up a couple hours before that. We were actually on Hilliard Street, but a couple of blocks back in another pretty seedy area of Atlanta. I picked that area because they wanted an urban vibe, but I knew I could do without anyone knowing I was doing it because it was abandoned. Anyway, we hear the roar of a car coming at us. We were like, What’s going on? And it was Gucci in a yellow Lambo, just flying down the street. He came up to us, unrolled his windows and he was just laughing his ass off. He was 30 minutes early. He was just laughing, smoking, like, “I bet you didn’t think I’d be early, did you?” I’m like, “No.” He rolls his window up and drives off. He was so excited that he was going to be on the cover of XXL that he couldn’t hide it. Also, we also didn’t know if OJ da Juiceman was gonna show up, but OJ da Juiceman was with him in the car and they were both just smiling, loving it.

I shot him for Vibe a month after that as well. Gucci’s photogenic. I think Gucci’s a lot sharper than people think he is. He was fun to shoot. We’re not talking about how to pose him, or whatever. He had an energy. I think I measure true superstars like that. Sometimes I feel [photographers] have to be swagger coaches and that’s not my job, in my opinion, personally. I’m here to capture who you are and make it a little richer than what it is. But I’m not here to give you style. Gucci deinfitely didn’t need any style points—he’s a character in front of the character. I have probably 2,000 shots of Gucci and almost all of them, I think, are useable as far as interesting shots are concerned. Sometimes you shoot someone and you get 500 shots and it’s like they just turned their head to the left or to the right or up and down—he’s got different energy for every shot.

More Gucci Mane x Zach Wolfe here and here.

Zach Wolfe on Mims:

It was February. February in Atlanta is really intriguing to me because it’s really foggy and it’s almost a Seattle-style of weather where you get really weird clouds that move really fast and sometimes it’s misting, sometimes the sun will pop through—it’s really unpredictable weather. There was a field—it’s not even a field, it’s just a lot; a housing project that they just leveled—and there was this huge, several football fields-big, empty piece of land right downtown Atlanta. And there’s a huge neon red Coca-Cola sign and at night it just illuminates the whole field. I had been going down there and scouting and I’d randomly done a location scout shot during the day and underexposed by like five stops, which is basically exactly what you see with this Mims shot. The person I was scouting with was completely silhouetted and had all of these dead trees behind him and I felt that if I could shoot Mims like that, but just popped one light on him, it would just be a moody shot. The album that I shot for was titled Guilt. I thought it would fit good for that theme: guilt based off of all of his success and coming from nothing—that was his mindset for the visuals for the album. It just came as a happy accident because I had been scouting a lot in that area. It’s a very somber shot—just pretty simple and really underexposed and shot with one light popping on his face.

More Mims x Zach Wolfe here.

extended from RESPECT. Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 3, on sale now:

The post Alfamega + Gucci Mane + Mims x Zach Wolfe appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.

excerpted from RESPECT. Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 3, on sale now:

As a sophomore at Mount Vernon High School in Iowa, Zach Wolfe took a photography elective to fill out his credits. Despite having grown up painting and drawing under the influence of creative parents and a grandmother who was an abstract artist, he had no desire to pursue the arts. “Once I hit high school, I must’ve thought I was too cool for school,” he says. “I just stopped doing art, period. I didn’t really consider [photography to be] art at the time. I was just messing around shooting my friends in high school; just trying to finish the assignment. I wasn’t really feeling it until I developed that roll of film—seeing the negatives, realizing that was my vision and my hands that developed the film, and my hands putting it into the enlarger and making a print.” To hear a photographer describe the darkroom process is to hear part science, part art, all transformation and mostly magic. Wolfe is no different. “Ever since then, there’s been no Plan B. I never looked back, and I never had any other goal in my life since that day but to do this. My parents bought me a darkroom with the little money they had a couple of months later. The last two years of high school, all I did was shoot and hang out in my little closet darkroom.”

After the jump: Wolfe shares the stories behind his shoots with Three 6 Mafia, T-Pain and Hurricane Chris. Which are not in the magazine and are all pretty much worth clicking for.

Three 6 Mafia:

I got hired by Vibe. It was their “Juice Issue” which highlights the people of that year who did big things. [Three 6 Mafia] had just won their Oscar and I couldn’t believe [Vibe] called me to shoot this. I was really freaking out when I got the call. They wanted me to drive to Memphis and shoot them going around Memphis with their Oscar and I was like, This is a dream come true. I can’t wait.

The funny story is we went up to Memphis to shoot this—we scouted out the day before and we had everything planned out. [Vibe] really wanted to get a shot of all three members walking down Beale Street on their Walk of Fame—they have music notes on Beale Street [so it would be] similar to a celebrity walking down Holloywood Boulevard with the stars—that’s what they really wanted. I can’t remember what else they wanted, but basically everything that was planned came to complete halt when [the group] showed up. We had Beale Street closed off, the cops were cool with it, we were all ready to go, we had lights all over the place. And basically just Juciy J and DJ Paul showed up and we were all like, Where’s Crunchy Black? And they were like, “There’s no more Crunchy Black.” And we were like,What? No one from Vibe knew, not even their publicist from New York knew that Crunchy Black was no longer part of the squad. I was the first person to find out about this and I’m like, “What do you mean?” I’m sitting there sweating because Vibe was like “All three of them.” I’m in the beginning photographer stages where I’m like, Any mistake can be my last mistake ever.  I’m worried about the photo editors at Vibe saying “Why did you not shoot Crunchy Black?” After a while they basically looked at me they were like, “Look: no Crunchy Black.” I’m like, Alright, moving on the next. I say, “Let’s do a shot of you guys walking down the Walk of Fame,” and they were like, “Nah.”

Basically, Juciy J was not really responsive at all. I was like, “What’s up, man? What’s going on?” He was like, “Zach, man, have you ever gone out drinking and smoking all night and partying and not slept?” I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Yeah. Thats where i’m at right now. Can you get me a Sprite?” He was just hanging on by a string. DJ Paul was cool; he was totally into it, but it was a struggle to get them in it together. It was hot out and I could tell I was losing them, so I suggested going into this restaurant and getting some food ’cause they said they were hungry and that’s what turned out to be in the shoot. I was like, “Put the Oscar on the table and let’s just get bunch of food, and just do what you want to do.” I remember after they got done eating Juicy J started falling asleep, which you can see in some of the shots. I was sweating as I was shooting because it was like, Vibe’s gonna… It’s over; I’m done. I remember driving back to Atlanta from Memphis, the whole time freaking out, telling my assistant, “I’m gonna turn around and find them. We have to go and shoot them somewhere else. I’m screwed; it’s over.” And it turned out to be one of the more well-known shoots I did. It’s pretty funny how things end up.

More Three 6 Mafia x Zach Wolfe here.

T-Pain:

This was another Vibe assignment. They wanted me to shoot him in Miami and I’d been going down to Miami for a long time now to shoot the Maximo Gomex Domino Park which is full of a lot of Cuban refugees. I had been shooting it just as a personal project for years and for some reason I just thought that T-Pain was the one to do it. I proposed it to them and it was a battle for like two weeks—they were like, No, just shoot him in the studio. Just shoot him outside of the studio. I feel like you can set T-Pain up and get a good shot of him, so my instincts were that we’d probably want to put him in some sort of a situation.

It was pretty cool. He didn’t know what to think of it. He showed up, he was still drunk from the night before, he pulled up in some $120,000 car—all he wanted was McDonald’s and just to hang out ad to stay out of the sun. I was like, “I think you should play dominoes with these guys.” He was like, “I don’t know how to play Dominos.” I said, “You’re a smart guy. You could figure it out.”  I got a couple fo these guys that I had met through the years and they remembered me. I gave that guy [in the picture] twenty bucks and this other guy twenty bucks and they were teaching T-Pain dominoes and he ended up loving it. He had a great time.

More T-Pain x Zach Wolfe here.

Hurricane Chris:

That guy definitely smokes more weed than anybody I’ve ever met in my life. He takes the crown. He literally smokes non-stop. Like, Lil’ Wayne has four weed rollers and gets handed packs of 12 blunts at a time—no. Hurricane Chris kills them all. That dude doesn’t even breathe air. It was a challenge to shoot him without him smoking. The label was like, We’re not going to use this shit. I was like, Fuck, it looks dope—I don’t give a fuck if you use it or not, I’ma shoot it! Every set up that we would do, he’d have to smoke one to two blunts and he would smoke them by himself—just smoke ’em down. He was pulling such big hits that smoke was like milk and it was making all these crazy textures. That’s all that was—just a simple black and white shot, black background.

More Hurricane Chris x Zach Wolfe here.

The post Three 6 Mafia + T-Pain + Hurricane Chris x Zach Wolfe appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.

Photographer Zach Wolfe flexed his documentarian chops and went with Outkast’s Big Boi to his old stomping grounds in Savannah, GA in this clip promoting Big Boi’s forthcoming solo album, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son Of Chico Dusty. Big Boi visits his old projects, recalls his grandmother playing “Buffalo Soldier” outside the window, signs some autographs and runs into some guy who claims Big Boi hit him “in the nuts” at some point. We’d love to hear more of that last story, but you can’t win them all.

After the jump: Two more Lucious Left Foot videos: “Fo Yo Sorrows” (feat. Too Short + George Clinton) and “Shine Blockas” (feat. Gucci Mane) which starts off with Big Boi picking up “a pack of footies” at about 3 a.m. in a local Wal-Mart. He boasts that they’re “no-show,” which is just the kind of collected randomness that makes our worlds go round.

The post Big Boi x Zach Wolfe | The Road to Sir Lucious Left Foot: Frazier Homes, Part 1 appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.