WILL NICHOLS TIES A NEW PALM TREE PRINT TO MF DOOM

Will Nichols titled his newest palm tree photograph Acapulco Gold, then closed the caption with two words: Rip MF DOOM. The photographer, who has been shooting palm trees for more than a decade, used the post to explain why he shoots the frames everyone else skips past, then attached that photo to a rapper who has been dead since 2020, with no lyric or title tying the two together. That gap between the tribute and the reference carries more weight here than the palm tree itself, and it is worth reading the caption slowly to see why.

"Rip MF DOOM" Closes a Caption About Color

Nichols opened the caption by naming the shot, then got specific about his own process. He wrote that to most people the image reads as another palm tree photo, but that he geeks out over the colors he can pull from a frame and lives for finding something inside it that most people would overlook. He added that the obvious photo moments will always be worth capturing, but the overlooked ones tend to become his favorites. The tribute arrives last and unexplained, two words on their own line after the technical talk about color grading ends, with nothing in between connecting a gold toned palm tree to a rapper who had already been dead for nearly six years by the time the post went up.

Palm Trees and Basketball Started This Habit

Nichols built his eye for the overlooked frame well before this post. He has been photographing palm trees for more than a decade, first at the beach and then as a conceptual series that pairs them with the other California fixation he grew up on. That series, Palm Trees and Basketball, launched on July 10, 2020 after five years of shooting both subjects, and in 2016 the Los Angeles Clippers commissioned him to shoot court side, an NBA franchise putting its name behind the same instinct that now geeks out over gold light hitting a trunk.

The work has a gallery behind it. Rosenbaum Contemporary in Boca Raton represents Nichols and showed the series in Montage, a group exhibition of contemporary photographers that ran from March 4 to April 3, 2021. The gallery describes a practice that has since moved into mixed media and painting while the intersection of palm trees and basketball stays at the center of it. In February 2021 he was one of fifteen artists who each customized a pair of Vans, signed by PARTYNEXTDOOR, for an auction on NTWRK that sent every dollar to the Black Music Action Coalition. He has worked with Plan X, has led a panel at ComplexCon about his art, and under the handle Palm Tree God has released editions of the work as digital collectibles, including Somewhere Else, a collection of 100 palms. A version of that instinct, naming the person behind the lens instead of the brand, showed up on Porsche's own account this August, when the automaker tagged 36 photographers on one post instead of claiming the images itself.

Two Images, One Swipe, No Edit Hidden

The post carries two images, not one. Nichols told followers to swipe to see the unedited version, putting his finished color work next to the raw file it came from on one carousel. That is a specific, checkable choice: most photographers post the edit and keep the before shot private, and Nichols built the second slide into the post on purpose. It turns a single palm tree photo into a short lesson on what his editing changes, rather than a finished image with no process attached, and it matches the caption's own claim that the overlooked details in a frame are what he is chasing, not the palm tree everyone else already sees.

MF DOOM Died in Leeds, the World Found Out on New Year's Eve

MF DOOM, born Daniel Dumile, died October 31, 2020, in Leeds, England, at 49. His family did not make the death public until December 31 of that year, so hip hop spent two months not knowing its masked villain was already gone. Dumile grew up in Long Beach, New York, started rapping as Zev Love X in the trio KMD in 1988, and lost his brother and groupmate DJ Subroc in 1993 before building the villain persona and metal mask that carried through Operation Doomsday and Madvillainy. A street in Long Beach was renamed in his honor in 2021. Nothing in Nichols' caption points to a specific DOOM song, lyric or title called Acapulco Gold, and no track by that name exists in DOOM's catalog, the way Supreme credited Larry Clark with 48 pages of unseen Tulsa without spelling out why now. Call this one early: an artist's personal account doubling as a photography archive, a decade of palm trees, court side Clippers credits and a gallery wall in Boca Raton, with a two word rap tribute that answers to nobody but Nichols himself.