Life After Death

Michael Lavine got almost no brief for Life After Death. "I was told, 'Get a hearse.' That's all the direction I got," he said. Sean Combs rejected the first graveyard pictures as not dramatic enough, so Lavine drove around on his lunch break and found a spot at the top of Cypress Hills Cemetery on the Brooklyn and Queens border.

The shoot took place on 24 January 1997. Biggie wore a long black coat and a bowler hat and leaned on a cane, because his left leg had been shattered in a car accident months earlier. He stands beside a hearse with the licence plate B.I.G., and a smoke machine fills the space around him. Lavine shot in black and white because he wanted the picture to feel timeless and to make Biggie seem "bigger than life."

On 9 March 1997 the Notorious B.I.G. was shot and killed, and the album was released sixteen days later, on 25 March. Lavine said the death gave the photograph a deeper meaning and "changed the whole dynamic." Groovey Lew styled the shoot.