When you look at a photo, it can transport you to the time and place the photo was taken, bringing back memories of those moments meaningful enough to capture with a lens. Music is the same way; the right song can remind you other times you heard it, of eras of your own life when that song meant everything to you.
The similarity between these art forms is the crux of my conversation with Sam Conant, the photographer better known as Cones. He has shot some of hip-hop’s hottest artists, from ASAP Rocky and Metro Boomin to Lil Uzi Vert and Trippie Redd. The Philly native got his start in 2014 crashing and hanging out after shows with his camera, and has since become a sought-after commercial shooter, working with recognizable brands like Nike, Spotify, and Universal Music Group.
Like another photographer I previously interviewed, Sagan Lockhart, Cones was there at the beginning of some of the brightest burning rap careers, capturing Uzi, Post Malone, Lil Tecca, and more well before they were performing in arenas, and he’s grown along with them. This Friday, November 8, Cones’ second photo book, Happy To Be Here, hits stores, documenting this rise, from his earliest experiences sneaking in to shoot his favorite artists to becoming one of their most trusted photographers. New Yorkers can check out the book in person at Cones’ first-ever photo gallery from Friday, November 8th through Sunday, November 10th inside KidSuper Studios. The book is avaialable to order here.
Cones was gracious enough to talk about the book and his experiences, while sharing a few tips, on a Zoom call. Check out our conversation below.
First, let me congratulate you. Second book. That’s awesome! One is hard enough.
Thank you so much.
There’s been about seven years between books. What have you learned since that first book?
I have learned, first and foremost, that it’s a process and it’s an artistic form.
When I was starting out, especially that first book, I was very just excited to be a part of it. I think the hip-hop community and the industry is what caught my eye from the very beginning. So, my start really was just to be around the music and to just be able to bring people together and document what was going on in front of me.
I think this book is much more… I fell in love with photography and I fell in love with the art of photography, and I wanted to showcase my understanding, my growth, and respect for the art form, and for everyone that allowed me to document them and their process. I think I’ve just learned so much more appreciation of what I do, what creatives do, and fighting to make that a career and make something that you can really stand on.
I’m interested in the process for how you organize and also how you select, not necessarily the best, but the ones you want to represent a time, or a place, or a technique you learned.
One of my mentors at the time [of the first book], saw all of these Polaroids just in bags, and they were just written years or tours on them, and he’s like, “Let me make you a book.” So, him and his girlfriend actually really took the designing of the first book down.
This book started out in a similar way. I actually reached out to him. This was during Covid, and it was tricky because I knew that this book required a lot of focus and a lot of time. I think he designed about 60 to 70 pages, he sent it back, and I came up with a four-page notes list for him. I was like, “This feels aggressive. This feels like it might push him to a place where the book doesn’t seem fun to him, and it seems more like a job.” He was already helping me so much. So, I actually took his blueprint and made the rest of the pages, which was an incredibly amazing process of me just going more in-depth, understanding InDesign, and seeing how he displayed some photos. Okay, “Let me get in this bag, and let me try some of those things myself.”
I did go through over, I want to say, 300,000 images or something like that. I was going through every hard drive, every cloud storage, anything I could find. As much as I wanted to represent this 10-year period, I also really wanted to represent what I loved and how I consumed it because a lot of my love for photography has come from chasing the artists or chasing the music that I really love, and not always just pulling up because people are big or something, but pulling up because I really love them. I was looking for images, in all honesty, that took me right back to that moment.
I think that’s the beauty of what a lot of this music does for us. It’s like, “Oh, Uzi 2000, this.” You’re like, “Man, I remember I was listening to that going to school or trying to go to college.” I wanted to have the similar effect with the photos, and being very benchmark moments or times in these last 10 years.
I loved scrolling through your Instagram and seeing some of the concepts and some of the designs that you’ve done with them, especially in the studio space. Do you have any favorite studio stories or favorite studio concepts that were the most fun to execute and how that came together?
So it’s funny. I did not spend the bulk amount of my, say, first five years in the studio. I was what I call chasing photos. I was doing anything that I could to make a photo look like it was taken in the studio, but I would might only have these guys for brief moments. As someone who was such a big consumer, I was very almost nervous to get in the studio because there was such beauty that had already been created in that space, and I wanted to do my best to match that. I think some of my favorite early on studio stuff was with Lil Tecca. Him and I started very early. We did one of his first press shoots together and we were photographing this one setup. I wanted to flip the image upside down, and I was like, “We’re the ones who curate how this photo is seen from now on.”
A lot of the photos in the book are really from that kind of run-and-gun era because those risks then brought me to be able to do a lot of what I do now.
And I wanted to make sure to cover that first era before I jump into a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing, say the last four or five years, which I’ve been doing a lot more studio stuff, a lot more album covers and rollouts and things like that. But it was only because of all these other moments of throwing myself in the unknown that I get to work with a little bit more certainty or a little bit more control in the space.
Of course, you do a lot of interviews, and you answer a lot of the same questions. People want to know how you got started. People want to know what you’re doing, blah, blah, blah. Do you ever have any questions that you wish people would ask you?
The question I get asked the most is not necessarily “how do you do what you do?” but more so, “how did you get the start?” A very important part of this book was providing an honest pathway to make what I am doing a little bit less intimidating for others and a little bit just honest. I didn’t get here from just taking amazing photos, and that was it. There was a lot of risk. There was a lot of betting on myself. I want to make sure to, when kids are going through similar obstacles that they have some sort of asset, whether it’s being able to reach me or have this book to be like, “Yo, others have fought through this. Others have pushed through this.”
I think I want people to risk it more to follow their vision and to kind of follow their dreams. Because as much as it’s awesome to be big online or have a photo go great, it’s sick when you beat that yourself. My big thing in this book is encouraging others to try and to fall and to learn from that process of fighting to do what you love. The amount of stuff I’ve learned, not just about photography, but about myself, and my own journey as a human being through trying to do what I love and trying to conquer that, in a sense, that’s a big point of this book.
Hey, in the words of another Philly icon, we talkin’ about practice.
Yeah, yeah. It just takes a lot. It’s like people think sometimes betting on yourself is like a one-time decision, but it’s that existing but no one’s looking. It’s not about what they’re seeing in the moment, but it takes, like, “Man, did you get up and pack that bag? Did you plan? Did you put everything in there that you really need?” Help yourself to do the great things that you want to do and work with yourself on pushing yourself to live up to what you know you could do.
