Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa
b. 1960
The American filmmaker and cinematographer Arthur Jafa is known for his explorations of black culture through various media, such as film, photography and collage. After studying film and architecture at Howard University in Washington, where he learned about the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, he started working as a film maker in the early 1990s, immediately showcasing his artistic range and his deep socio-cultural concerns. His imaginative visions come to life in his film and music video production as well as his collaborations with celebrated directors such as Spike Lee and Stanley Kubrick.
Arthur Jafa is an American filmmaker and cinematographer whose work deals primarily with the experiences of blackness in American culture. His dynamic practice includes film, photography, happenings and artefacts, which all reference and question the articulations of American black culture, encompassing its beauty, power and alienation.
Jafa was born in 1960 in segregated Tupelo, Mississippi and grew up surrounded by diverse elements of American culture, such as science fiction and jazz. Jafa studied film and architecture at Howard University in Washington D.C., where he learned about the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Resultingly, he began to consider his art in relation to a lineage of black aesthetics rather than as an isolated practice.
‘One of the basic conundrums of black being’, Jafa stated, ‘is that the very things that have oppressed us are the very things that define who we are and if we erase all the suppression and stuff, we sort of erase ourselves’. Such unique philosophy constitutes a lifelong concern that is engrained across his artistic expressions.
Jafa started working as a filmmaker in the 1990s during which time he worked on internationally recognised movies. He was the director of photography for ‘Daughters of the Dust’ (dir. Julie Dash, 1991) as well as the cinematographer for ‘Crooklyn’ (dir. Spike Lee, 1994) and ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1999). Jafa has also authored music videos for celebrities such as Solange, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, which celebrate the distinct individuality of black performers.
Jafa’s artistic production shifts fluidly between film, sculpture and performance, constantly aiming to challenge traditional modes of illustrating the world through the perspective of the black body. Such representations are not only visual but also conceptual, cultural and idiomatic. Jafa focuses on the many implications of existing as a black individual in today’s world: joy, beauty and magic but also horror, pain and alienation. His images function as a network, which links historical footage, music videos, viral memes and news broadcasts to paint a personal but incredibly meaningful portrait of lived reality.
Such use of images is articulated across media, for instance in his notebooks of clipped images of mainly people and artefacts, borrowed from various magazines and publications. These objects constitute a subjective but rigorous research into black culture and its representations.
More recently, Jafa worked on highly politicised documentaries in an attempt to create a shared timeline of black experiences. In 2013 he produced the influential documentary ‘Dreams are Colder than Death’ about the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Notably, in 2016 Jafa released the video ‘Love is the Message, the Message is Death’, a collection of clips from pop videos, TV news and police cameras set to Kanye West’s song ‘Ultralight Beam’.
Since then, Jafa’s work has been displayed in solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the US. His videos have been showcased at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Serpentine Gallery in London, among others.
The mournful quality of Jafa’s work reflects the unsolvable bind of black identities, which for centuries have existed only in relation to colonial hierarchies. While Jafa rejects facile redemption stories and happy endings, his art is powerfully alive; it is telling of a culture still emerging from historical oppression and finally taking shape in its own terms.
LA Haze
Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa is famed for his artistic renditions of the world from the perspective of black Americans, which materialise in video art, photographs and artefacts. Of these works is ‘LA Haze’, photographs of an early morning in South Los Angeles. They were included in the 2017 exhibition ‘A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions’ at the Serpentine Gallery in London and were generated into editions the following year.
Jafa’s is known for his powerful depictions of black American culture, providing a platform for its complexities and contradictions by portraying both its glamour and misery. Yet, ‘LA Haze’ is manifestly devoid of human figures. Viewers are confronted by a cropped urban landscape rendered in various tones of grey, where a road intersection is populated only by street lights and traffic signs. Palm trees emerge from the mist, ghost-like figures seemingly advancing towards the surface of the photographs.
The title of the exhibition offers a key to interpret this image: ‘rendition’ points to the complex, layered narratives associated to black American experiences, which exist in oppositional relation to whiteness and is thus subjected to continuous negotiations.
A fundamental element of black American identity, Jafa has stated, is their painful history of oppression. South Los Angeles is home to a large black community and has been the stage of civil uprisings against police brutality. Perhaps, the desolate early morning cityscape of ‘LA Haze’ constitutes a parallel to the alienated existence of black individuals in a white world. The utter solitude it depicts, however, could also be liberating, as the absence of racialised figures allows viewers to imagine new, independent narratives.
In these photographs, Jafa mobilises the cultural implications of corporeality and race to offer an alternative vision into a space that is both imaginary and real, in which identities can be formed anew.
Notebooks
Arthur Jafa
As a filmmaker and cinematographer, Arthur Jafa is continuously aware of how black bodies are depicted in the media, and of how collecting and juxtaposing these depictions can generate powerful social discourses. Since the early 1990s, he has stored hundreds of images from books, magazines, newspapers and photographs them in notebooks. While they began as intimate objects intended for personal consultation, they have subsequently been featured in exhibitions across the world.
These artefacts are not simply a repository of pop culture but constitute a complex narrative that both portrays and produces black identities. For Jafa, they exist in relation to a hegemonic white gaze, and need to be constructed within this dialectic. ‘It’s all associative’ he has stated. ’The whole idea was always if you took this thing and that thing and you overlap them, the place in which they overlapped was you’.
The things Jafa collects in these books include black athletes, entertainers and ordinary people, fictional characters such as Mickey Mouse, influential musicians Tupac and Miles Davis, babies, planets, injured and dead bodies, art reproductions and architectural photographs.
Before starting to organise them digitally, Jafa had assembled more than two hundred notebooks of images, which also inspired his cinematic work for their similarity to his fast-cut films and videos. Combining overlapping practices, the notebooks represent, Jafa has stated, a collection of ‘black expressive modalities’. In 2013, Jafa transformed a selection of these images into the video ‘APEX’, which displays them in quick succession to the tune of techno music and the beeping of a heart monitor.
The notebooks, Jafa claims, constitute a language of black experiences, mediated by both the commodifying power of media and the intimate lens of the artist, who assembled images that range from utter misery to the most ecstatic joy. The two sides of the spectrum are, for him, inextricably bound.
