Chi Modu dies

Why it matters

Chi Modu died on May 19, 2021, of cancer. He was 54. He had spent the previous several years openly battling the illness while continuing to work. Chi Modu is the photographer behind a substantial fraction of the iconic Source Magazine cover images from the mid-1990s rap-press peak. The 1994 Snoop cover. The 1995 Tupac cover (the one in the white tank top). The Method Man cover. The Mobb Deep cover. The Nas cover. The cover of Notorious B.I.G. that became the most-reproduced single image of mid-90s rap photography. Chi shot somewhere over 30 of those covers across the mid-1990s. The visual register he established (large-format film, often-monochrome, plain backgrounds, the subject's full attention to the camera) became the dominant visual vocabulary of rap photography for the rest of the decade and well into the 2000s. He was 54. The body of work he left is, in the rap-photography canon, foundational. You should look at his archive if you have not. The faces are the part of mid-90s rap most listeners know best, and Chi Modu is the one who put them on film.