As a rapper, I’ve always believed in the inverse of that old cliché about pictures and how many words they’re worth. For someone like me, words are worth a thousand pictures. Every line in every verse starts as a snapshot, a photograph that exists in memory or imagination until the moment I reinterpret it into written language.

There’s nothing particularly profound about this analogy between rapping and photography. All art comes from the same impulses: to describe, to document, to emote, to mythologize. For my entire adulthood, I’ve rapped for money and taken pictures for nothing, whether digitally via phone camera or experimenting with older film cameras and setting up a darkroom at home. I’ve come to realize these two mediums aren’t just analogous; they’re symbiotic. The energy, poetry and rebelliousness of hip-hop attracted me to it. But the visual imagery—particularly the photograph—drew me closer, giving me a reference point for the images my imagination created out of the listening experience.

I can’t listen to the rap I grew up on without seeing a photograph in my head. Something from a magazine, maybe. An album cover. 2Pac standing beside Biggie with his middle fingers up. KRS-One peeking out of a window with a gun in homage to a Malcolm X photo. Jay-Z in a black suit with his fedora covering his eyes. Run-DMC standing in their b-boy stances. Big Daddy Kane about to smash Madonna and Naomi Campbell at the same damn time.

So when someone asks me why I’ve become immersed in photography, I tell them that my music—and the music that molded me—would be nothing without it. The documented images inspired the imagined images that fueled my songwriting. Photography literally kickstarted this rap shit for me.

In Blue Scholars’ early years, I worked at the Wing Luke Museum in Chinatown (it was the Wing Luke Asian Museum back then) as an exhibit curator. Every day, I engaged with photographers and photographs and frames and galleries. Occasionally I was asked to take photos of people and places myself for exhibitions and historical documents (you can still see my work on the walls and in the archives of the museum). My co-workers were supportive of my rap aspirations and even bought the first box of CDs we pressed.

The relationship between words and images is something I’ve carried long after leaving the museum for the stage and studio. Blue Scholars songs were made amidst images, and images were then made from the music. We had press photos before we had a finished album. We rapped inside art galleries. Soon after, we made videos. Eventually, all these experiences birthed the concept of our third album, Cinemetropolis, a “reverse soundtrack” of music influenced by photography and film.

During the time we wrote and recorded Cinemetropolis, I volunteered to teach an after-school photography class to 6th and 7th graders. I gave them an assignment to bring examples of photographs that inspired them. More than half of them were fashion photographs, and nearly all of those were of music performers.

It hit me how much music and photography had changed from my childhood to the present. I’m an ’80s baby, from the era when nobody could record music and release an album simply because they wanted to. You had to wait until Friday to see the photos you took on Monday. In contrast, the kids in my class were listening to music someone made in their bedroom. They were instantly deleting and retaking photos on their phones until they got the right one. Which they then posted online.

And here I was, a rapper with a camera who uses software to make and distribute music, teaching youth about old-ass cameras and this thing called film. I gave them a history lesson on Oskar Barnack, who innovated the portable 35mm camera in 1925, which gave way to mobile photography, which went digital and became the phone cameras in the hands of the people who captured footage of Oscar Grant being killed by BART police in Oakland 84 years later—an incident that then became the subject of many rap lyrics, including my own.

It’s 2013 and photography and rap have reached a saturation point. Technology has not only democratized both mediums but also opened the floodgates to an audience. More people rap now than ever, and you can usually see them on a stage with more people carrying DSLRs than musical instruments. I’m not sure if it’s by coincidence or by design that this is happening on the cliff of a global economic meltdown. Either way, it’s all being documented and I’m one of many, many storytellers writing while peering through a camera lens—someone born at the tail end of the analog era who came of age in a digital one. A rapper with a camera.

I heard an old man say there would’ve been far fewer wars if photography was invented 2,000 years ago, and, instead of a million paintings of Jesus, there was just one photograph of him. That sounded crazy when I first heard it. But the longer I rap, the more sense it makes.

Prometheus Brown is one-half of hip-hop group Blue Scholars. He’s currently the Artist-in-Residence at Town Hall and is working on a new Blue Scholars album to be released this year.