A couple weeks ago, I was commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to create an original artwork to accompany Danyel Smith’s article/first-person account of working with the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs in the late 90’s and early mid aughts, through her then role as Editor-in-Cheif of Vibe. It appears in this week’s issue, available in print and online.
I worked with Deputy Art Director Annie Jen, who explains in a brief behind-the-scenes feature within the contributors page, that she wanted the artwork “to allude to some of the tension the writer felt about her relationship” to the embattled Combs, now charged with sexual assault and trafficking (he’s at least undeniably a perpetrator of domestic violence). “Smith considers how much of her career is tied up in Diddy’s web of power.” And moreover, as an influential female in the entertainment industry, Smith lives with what we, twenty to thirty years later, might expect: his web is not especially expectational.
Indeed, after reading a draft of the article, before diving into the making of this artwork, it struck me that Smith doesn’t make many excuses for herself as a participant in the industry that perpetuated Combs’s and others’ sexist and disturbing behavior. She describes one particularly alarming encounter with Combs that occurred in the late 90’s but then, after a little time passes, seems to a great extent to go back to business as usual, not only working with the rap star, but embracing him in event photos. I remember Combs’s music from those days, I was in high school then. The industry gave us what we wanted: hits we enjoyed and flashy personas. Years later, we get a nuanced peek, if very much in retrospect, into the layers of that milieu.
This artwork is in the vein in which I’ve been working since mid 2022, with some small modifications. In this case, the original photographs were sourced from stock collections and licensed by the magazine, after I made dozens of digital mockups from low-res sample files and, with Jen and the magazine’s editors, decided which of the shortlist would fit best with the writing. I always prefer to work with my own photos, but it’s not always possible to do so given a project’s constraints.
This piece is Version 2; in Version 1, one of the comprising photos the magazine licensed was very low-resolution (the stock collection had advertised it as much higher-res), which substantially limited my print sizes. After Senior Photo Editor Amy Kellner tracked down the high-res file from the original photographer himself, I was somehow able to physically fabricate this second larger and more intricate piece—in two days, right down to the wire—to meet the deadline because I knew it would look better in the magazine.
