Skin tight

I start this portrait project "Skintight" 8 years ago. I take picutures of hiphop artists form the united states at my studio in austria. “Your coming of age is about representing who you are, and hip-hop music contains a message — it tells a story about who you are — and what you wear is also proof of it,” says the rapper Nasir Jones, a.k.a. Nas in an interview with Hilary Moss for The New York Style Magazine, June 25, 2015. So i deceded to make the portraits without the mask of clothing. Like the poetry of words, shows the skin and the body, the poetry of their personalities and tells a story about who you are. The moment when we start to shoot is always delicate, because there is an austrian female photographer - me - who ask the rappers (from Emc-Group, Camp Lo, Smif-n-wessun, Murs,...) to take off the shirts. This is not common. It becomes a very private atmosphere when they show me their "realness"/"shyness".