Phillip Leeds
In the bold, brash, in-your-face photo book Big Shots!, out this month from Rizzoli, longtime music-industry insider turned photographer Phillip Leeds trained his vintage Polaroid camera on the familiar faces of the fashion and hip-hop worlds. Famous and emerging rappers and designers, supermodels and producers, and dozens of other luminaries in between give it their best for Leeds’s pared-down, in medias res portraits—shot over the course of nearly 15 years in various New York City locales. “I was just taking them for the joy of taking them,” Leeds says. “I don’t ask much of the subject. I tell them to be themselves and to give me as much or as little as they want.” Think of Big Shots! as the coolest yearbook of the new millennium.