Since her early teens, the British photographer Jennie Baptiste has recorded on film the worlds of fashion, dance and music. When an opportunity came up, in 1999, to photograph the rapper Rodney Hylton Smith, also known as Roots Manuva, for the hip-hop magazine Fatboss, her editor Matthew Carter (now a D.J. known as Jaguar Skills) suggested she experiment with makeup.
“Camouflage was huge around that time,” she said in an interview in mid-September in central London. And Smith, with whom she had built up a rapport over the years, was up for it. “Just do whatever you got to do,” she remembered him saying. “Create!”
The resulting black-and-white image was instantly iconic, and unexpectedly intimate: Smith leans his head back, eyes closed, paint running in ribbons down the side of his face and neck.
Since July, this portrait has been on show in the National Portrait Gallery’s 1990s room, surrounded by those of other British heavyweights — Naomi Campbell, The Prodigy, Oasis — who defined the era. How the photograph landed in the gallery’s collection, though, says as much about Baptiste’s own firepower as it does Roots Manuva’s.
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