Photographer Michel Haddi has had a somewhat eventful life. He spent much of his childhood in orphanages and it was there that he discovered the world of fashion, thanks to old magazines that his mother brought him when she visited him. He never knew his father and from a very young age he had fortune on his side: whether when the police stopped him in Saudi Arabia with a trunk full of whiskey, when he was shot in Berlin the day the wall fell or when he ran into Bin Laden himself in Yemen. From all these situations he emerged unscathed. ”When I was young I came to live with my mother in a banlieue in Paris. The neighborhood was terrible. I looked around and thought: ‘If I don’t get out of here I’m going to end up being a fucking criminal.’ [risas]. There was no plan B. They offered me $7,000 to take a car full of gold from Romania to Paris, but I knew that was a dead end,” says Haddi.
Haddi published her latest book this fall, The Legend. Tupac (MHS Publishing), about another no less legendary guy: Tupac Shakur. On September 13, 1996, Tupac Amaru Shakur, better known to his followers as 2Pac and one of the best-known rappers in the United States, was murdered in Las Vegas. For many, his death was another step in the verbal escalation that had occurred between the artist and Notorious BIG, another icon of the hip hop. The two had been sending each other threatening messages and that moment would go down in history as the most pronounced in the confrontation between musicians from both coasts. Tupac was western; Biggie, this one. Shakur would instantly become a global symbol and his image would become the hallmark of gangsta rap, a style that in those years was the favorite on American streets and that talked about guns, drugs and street corners, about prisons and revenge.
Haddi was one of the last photographers who had the opportunity to immortalize the rapper. “Tupac reminded me of Malcolm X, and I told him so. Then we joked about it and I asked him to make the X with his arms [sonríe]. Do you know something? I looked straight at him and saw a dead man. I have a lot of intuition and I think that intuition has saved my life five or six times. The same thing happened to me with Brandon Lee when I worked with him. [el actor murió en 1993, en un accidente durante un rodaje]”I saw a dead man,” he says. “I was living in Venice Beach when the magazine The Source He called me for a photo shoot with Tupac. He had just finished filming Poetic justice, John Singleton’s film, and when it arrived at the studio I was surprised by its elegance and education. The guy had a fabulous soul.”
There aren’t too many popular faces who haven’t sat in front of his camera: from Cameron Diaz to Kate Moss, from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers to David Bowie, everyone has ended up posing for this French-Algerian’s lens.
A part of Haddi’s work can currently be seen in the Beyond Fashion exhibition, at the 29 Arts in Progress gallery in Milan. The project is designed in rotations. The first can be enjoyed until December 22, while the second will start on January 16 of next year and will last until March 16. In each of the rotations, different images will be displayed.
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