Jaÿ-Z, as photographed for his debut album Reasonable Doubt by Jonathan Mannion on April 1, 1996.

When the Cleveland native first met with Dame Dash in the Roc-A-Fella Records offices on John Street, to secure his first major gig he said he would charge the label $300 less than their current lowest quote. With their brown paper bag budget running down, Dash accepted the offer and hired Mannion to come back in a few weeks to shoot the cover and packaging.

At the time the album was known as Heir to the Throne, so Mannion prepared a regal-themed board to present to the Roc team. Just hours before the album’s shoot Jaÿ switched the title to Reasonable Doubt, feeling that the original was perhaps too presumptuous for a debut album. The title switch gave the listener the opportunity to decide if he was indeed throne-worthy. 

After hearing of the title and theme change, Mannion would soon be the one to convince Jaÿ to move from Scarface-influenced, Versace linen, Miami drug-running visuals to the now-classic New York Mafia crime theme. Mannion encouraged Jaÿ to “keep it Brooklyn” and used John Gotti collections and old police photos and murder-scenes from the 1930s and ‘40s as inspiration points. Hov, Dash, and Kareem “Biggs” Burke went and fitted themselves out in $3,000 suits for the shoot, They also brought along a large amount of cash—$200,000—and handguns to be used as props. It was from this stack of cash that Mannion was paid his $1,300 fee at the end of the shoot.

The photo shoot took place inside and on the roof of Mannion’s old apartment building, located under the Westside Highway on West 72nd Street and Riverside in Manhattan. “It was done in a dusty spare room,” he once recalled in an interview with BET in 2016. “I just dropped the white backdrop, then I shot it all with daylight. It was kind of like my personal little studio, because it’s just empty space with beautiful North light. Up there with my tripod, it’s kinda dusty and funky, but you know, we made it work and it all contributed to the vibe – and the quality of the light was beautiful.” After the shoot inside, they headed up to the roof to get some shots in the fading sunlight. “Back then, it was all busted and beat up, and it fit the vibe,” he told Complex. I knew I could get some beautifully composed shots, based on traditional cameras. I was shooting with Hasselblads and Rolleiflexes, like press photographers did back in the Civil Rights era.” 

Jonathan Mannion counts Reasonable Doubt as one of the greatest albums of all-time, explaining to BET how he “speaks about the album as a complete project. Because, over time, there are many artists that deliver amazing singles. And its like, maybe there’s two, three, four good songs on the album and the rest are sort of filler and fluff. That’s kind of a typical analysis of majority of the albums out there. There’s albums that stand out that are complete thoughts from start to finish. I look at Reasonable Doubt as that. The flow, the rhythm, the cadence, the sequencing, everything sort of built on what happened before in order to paint a complete picture of everything that Jaÿ was seeing and around at the time.”