EAZY E SKATEBOARD ARCHIVE
Most of Ithaka’s archive images is still on negatives but he has been busy unearthing most of his analogue work as he puts together a photo book of the NWA sessions titled Beyond South Central (1988-1991). With skateboarding culture and photography as a starting point, Ithaka fashioned himself as a renaissance man extending into music, poetry, sculpture and even insect study in Brazil. and then Eazy E and Ice Cube as solo artists. His first published images ran in Thrasher Magazine but it wasn’t until he started as a promotional photographer for Priority Records that his photography really went deep into L.A.’s then burgeoning hip hop scene, capturing the first official publicity and album cover shoots for N.W.A. Ithaka grew up in Los Angeles where he started shooting skaters while still in high school. In the ’80s, I was doing all of those things when two burgeoning cultures – skateboarding and hip-hop – found themselves entangled. “But it wasn’t long ago that the fairly nubile movements were finding themselves. “Today, it may seem natural that there’s no divide between the two entities, like it’s been that way forever” says Ithaka.
EAZY E SKATEBOARD PROFESSIONAL
As the story goes, it wasn’t until the mid-to-late ’80s that professional skater Natas Kaupas appeared on the cover of Thrasher magazine wearing a Public Enemy t-shirt that the two youth cultures began to run in the same circles. Skateboarding and hip hop cultures were yet to be as closely associated as they are today. The locals included plenty of skaters and N.W.A was still to reach the height of popularity. The image was shot at a time when Venice was a much seedier than it is today. It happened while Fab Five Freddy was asking Dre and Cube some interview question about 75 yards away, so I wasn’t really sure what to focus on.an hour long episode of Yo! MTV Raps being created about Eazy and N.W.A, hosted by Fab Five Freddy being shot on a number of different days and locations around Los Angeles,” says Ithaka. I’m pretty sure Eazy was signing someone’s skateboard, a longer street board. I’m not even sure he ever knew I took those five or six pictures or not. “Eazy wasn’t skating as part of the shoot, he was just skating for the fun of it. To capture these moments of candor Ithaka had to be a keen observer of visual intricacies both big and small. I wasn’t even sure I should have been using too much film on the shot.” The skateboard wasn’t his own, he’s signed it for someone and I think kind of borrowed it without asking. Literally anything could have gone down that day. “This was at the height of his fame and Venice was a bit rougher back in those days.
“I think Eazy was wearing the vest for legitimate reasons,” recalls Ithaka. Eazy-E died of complications related to AIDS some seven years after these photos were taken, in 1995. The rest of the proof sheet is a deep dive showing members of N.W.A spending the day with Fab Five Freddy for Yo! MTV Raps. Taken in 1989, shot #27 on the contact sheet, shows Eazy-E born Eric Wright in all his bravado and swagger. Stored away for 25 years and just recently seen for the first time (pictured below in “The Shot”) it’s one of those shots that reveals, in hindsight, a moment in time when LA hip hop was becoming a force and a nascent group of MC’s and producers was crafting their sound and vision. The image of Eazy-E skateboarding in Venice Beach, wearing a bulletproof vest was never published.
We spoke with Ithaka Darin Pappas the photographer behind some of N.W.A’s earliest promo photos about the rarely seen image of Eazy-E skateboarding in Venice Beach while rocking a bulletproof vest… Ithaka Darin Pappas On Photographing a Bulletproof Vest-Wearing, Skateboarding-Riding Eazy-E by Vikki Tobak (originally published in Mass Appeal Magazine January 5th 2017)
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