We’re looking at Mobb Deep from their first album cover session, these two kids were fourteen years old. Prodigy and Havoc were fourteen when they released their first record and they came to my studio for the album cover shoot. Before that, I had met them and they had shown me this Japanese rice-cutter, it was like a little scythe. And they wanted to use it in the picture but they only had one, they needed two of them. So I made two little choppers that looked like sickles, made ‘em just for the photo-session. Then this particular picture, we were in the photo-studio and the smoke machine broke down in the middle of the shoot and wouldn’t make any more smoke. So we just took some tissue paper I had collected, a pile of garbage all around the East Village of New York, and brought it to the photo-studio. So we just stuffed tissue paper into the trash and just really started burning it and making more smoke. That made a pretty cool shot. — George DuBose in Grandslam Magazine (2003)
