Photographer Says He's Sitting on 15 Never-Before-Seen Photos of Notorious B.I.G.

The New York-based photographer who captured the Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls, for an iconic Interview Magazine feature in 1994 says the rest of the shoot’s negatives just turned up.

“Twenty-one years later, I find them in the most surprising of places — in the inside pocket of a jacket that was heading for Goodwill,” says David McIntyre in a video he hopes will round up the financial support he needs to jumbo-print the photos and display them in a free-to-the-public exhibit.

He says uploading the rare photos to Facebook and Instagram ”would do Biggie an injustice.”

“These pictures have to be printed big — very big — bigger than life,” McIntyre says in the video. ”So you can get close and see every detail. So you can feel his presence.”

According to the photographer, these never-before-seen pics of Biggie were shot in the summer of ’94, a few months before Biggie released his first album, Ready to Die.

“We did the photographs a few blocks from here, on Jay Street [in DUMBO]. In one, you can see the twin towers in the distance, beyond the Manhattan Bridge,” he says.

In another shot, McIntyre tells DNAinfo that Biggie smokes a joint on a street corner; in another, he shapes his hand like a gun and points it toward the camera. “One of my favorites is him looking down with a thoughtful expression, and it’s really angelic,” he says.

The photographer has launched a flashy Kickstarter campaign to raise the $28,000 he says he needs to “mount a Notorious B.I.G. gallery show that will be open and free to the public.”

It’s all a little over-the-top — but you’ve got to give a man credit for trying to put some drama back into the drop, old-school hip-hop style.

Photo courtesy of David McIntyre/Kickstarter.