How do you advertise a Swedish bank? With Snoop Dogg and Afghan hounds

The last time we spoke to photographer Philippe Jarrigeon he spoke us through his fascination with photographing garden mazes, but things appear to have escalated – and changed – a fair bit.

For a recent commission, Philippe was contacted by creative agency Nord DDB to work on a new project visualising Swedish bank Klarna. The message of the campaign, as Philippe describes, is “about getting smooth with your money and how a bank can be sweet”. That’s how he ended up photographing Snoop Dogg surrounded by Afghan hounds.

Snoop Dogg, it turns out, “is a kind of ‘muse’ of the company,” Philippe tells It’s Nice That. “All the creative concept was about making portraits of him in a festival fairyland paradise, with his surreal gang and hairy dog family friends.” The idea behind the shoot, other than this point obviously, was to inject a”lots of humour and fantasies” in what Philippe describes as “a very creative project”.

The team too, as you’d imagine, Philippe notes as “amazing… and a fantastic casting” including styling by Clare Byrne, set design by Andrea Cellerino, make-up by Ciara O Shea, hair (the dogs or models!?) by Anna Cofone, production by JN Production and casting by Creartvt. “What more could you hope for? Snoop Dogg and Afghans helped indeed to bring magic to a shoot day.”

This wasn’t actually the first time Philippe has worked with Snoop Dogg either, shooting the cover for his 2015 record Bush with creative agency, I Am Other, which is run by Pharrell Williams (this story just keeps unravelling). But in terms of the reaction to the photo series, the photographer has a feeling “the images have met little success”.

Nevertheless, Philippe is still excited to see them printed – and large too “apparently they are on the screen in Time Square” and for him, that “means something for a photograph anyway”.