Radar reports that noted photographer Al Pereira has sued Nas for sharing a photo he took of him, 2Pac and Redman outside of Club Amazon in 1993 without permission or obtaining a license for it. Check out the photo on Hiphopdx website. According to court documents, Nas re-uploaded the photo to his Instagram account in 2020, three years after Pereira registered copyright for it.
Pereira strongly believes, the value of the photo diminished after Nas posted it to Instagram. He filed his suit in February. Nas is being sued for damages and an injunction for using Al Pereira work.
Pereira's lawsuit against Nas isn't the first he has filed regarding his work. He sued Kylie and Kendall Jenner in 2017 for allegedly using his photographs of Pac and Notorious B.I.G. for a clothing line. Culture Crush interviewed Vikki Tobak, the author of Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop, about the moment she discovered the photo of a young Nas, Pac, and Redman, as well as the Notorious B.I.G.
“We uncovered an Al Pereira photo that’s a very infamous photo of Biggie, Redman, and Tupac together,” she said. “And also on that contact sheet, when we were going through it, there was a strip of images of Tupac and Nas. It was already funny, when Al tells the story of some “big guy” trying to get into his photo of Tupac and Redman, and that it turned out to be Biggie Smalls himself before he was signed.
“So on top of that, it turns out there had never been a photo of Tupac and Nas together. Al never realized it was on the contact sheet because at the time he took it, Nas wasn’t famous at all. It was in 1993, and Nas’s first album didn’t come out until 1994. He was just some kid, recording and making his way, and ruining the shot. And Al, being the kind of photographer that he is, was like “I’m going to get the photos of the people that I can sell to magazines, and that is Tupac and Biggie.” So that photo, when we uncovered it, meant a lot to Nas, because it also had one of his closest friends, who ended up passing away a few years after the photo was taken, in the photo with him.”
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