Booba, PNL, Aya Nakamura, Jul, SCH… they all passed in front of his lens. Black hat pointed at his head and camera grafted onto his hand, at 39 years old, Fifou is the photographer to whom we owe the most famous album covers of French rap.
Nicknamed “the man of 1000 versions”, this enthusiast – who however admits that he no longer keeps the number of his productions up to date – has risen since the early 2000s to the rank of essential French rap thanks to his innovative style. and the overflowing creativity of him.
A 20-year career, started in a Parisian studio and covered in 560 pages of the book File, Archive, Available this Thursday in bookstores. The opportunity to return to the journey of this man in the shadows who knew how to highlight French rap.
First official cover with Kool Shen
“I quickly knew that I wanted to work in the image and be a cartoonist,” Fifou assures the BFMTV microphone. It was in high school that this rap enthusiast took his first steps in the industry. At 16, he writes a column on Vallée FM, the Chelles association radio, a program that takes place just before a program dedicated to rap, hosted by DJ Mars, creator of the Time Bomb label.
“I had my book with sketches of rappers and I went to see the artists when they were coming off the radio, offering to draw them and redo their logo. That was how, before Instagram and Myspace, I made myself known”, confesses the photographer.
Lunatic, Oxmo Puccino, X-Men, all the most influential rappers of the time followed one another at the Vallée FM microphone. In this place, the high school student will also meet the artist Princess Aniès, who will become one of his close friends and will be the first to introduce him to the world of rap.
It was in 2005 when Fifou made his first official cover. Asked by Kool Shen’s (NTM) entourage, the young photographer has never done a studio shoot. But not enough to discourage this self-taught man who shoots more than 1,000 photos of the rapper in one afternoon.
“During this session I realized that I had a lot to learn. It was a crash test for me. I had no notion of a studio team but I had a kind of click: I told myself that I could do it”, explains Fifou. .
Result, among the many photos taken by Fifou, only one is not blurred. Kool Shen will keep it for his single The future is ours, in feat with Rohff and Dadoo. The beginning of the ascent for the young photographer.
All the Paris metro
Fifou is quickly becoming more and more requested by artists. In his 9m2 Parisian converted studio, this enthusiast continues filming and signing hundreds of album covers. His strong point: his unwavering availability and his ability to improvise with all the artists he works with.
“At that time I did not count my work hours, I worked day and night. At home it was like at the doctor, you would meet very famous people such as independents, actors, stylists… It was a kind of Parisian Factory where all the underground and well-known Paris intersected, it was quite colorful ”, he describes.
One thing leads to another, the photographer even gained international notoriety: he shot a short film with one of his idols, Snoop Dogg, in Los Angeles in 2013 and ran into Mobb Deep in an apartment in New York by chance.
His talent and innovative touch also allow Fifou to collaborate with the highly demanded NLP. Never meeting the two rappers, the photographer shoots their album cover in the legendReleased in 2015, it has become a staple of French rap.
“Everything was done through the networks. NLP were precursors of this way of working. It was a new way of creating visually for me and it was also a bit like my return to illustration”, explains Fifou.
From photographer to art director
While today Fifou could fully enjoy his fame and only work with big shots, the photographer is still first and foremost a rap enthusiast and guard; anchored in the body, the desire to collaborate with everyone.
“Whether the artists are independent, in place, confirmed… I pay equal attention to them. To me, they are all superheroes of the rap culture and they are all more impressive than the others. I will be passionate about working with them” . someone like Naps than with a new artist that nobody knows about”, assures the photographer.
But this jack of all trades wants to broaden the scope of his creativity. With certain artists, he now occupies more the role of artistic director than that of photographer. “There are a lot of album releases, so you have to be immediately relatable and stand out from the crowd compared to everything you can see in French rap,” he explains.
And to add: “I am working more and more in 360 because today we are no longer just on a cover, it is a global DA: behind the cover there is potentially a clip, a set design, merhandising…”
The aftermath, this madman of images imagines them in the making of clips, an exercise that he has already tried in particular with SCH and Dinos. “For me, video is the natural evolution of photography because you have more and more staging ideas that you can’t necessarily do in photography. Making music videos is something that interests me, more and more.
Source: BFM TV
