It is easy to walk through a city not making eye contact, but for photographer Khalik Allah this contact is essential. He sees each individual he photographs. And his photographs in turn allow us to see them, to acknowledge who we might ignore, to look through Allah’s eye and into theirs, and to recognize them as individuals. This is the power of Allah’s work, who started as a filmmaker, notably working on music videos with the Wu-Tang family or Beyoncé. Here, he gives us a deeper sense of people as people, to share and enlighten, even when the message may not be clean or easy.
The images in this exhibition on view at Gitterman Gallery, in New York, are drawn primarily from images in his recent book Souls Against the Concrete (University of Texas Press, 2017). Made at night on 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem, the images provide a glimpse into a world and people that many choose to ignore. His subjects are often drug addicts, homeless, or both. Using only the available light from shop windows, street lights, or subway platforms, he photographs them with a slow color film, a combination that produces images full of grain and texture, a visual shorthand for the roughness and intensity of life on the street, and his own struggles early in life. The light is also often harsh or even surreal, resulting in figures awash in blues and reds. Author Luc Sante, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The result is a panorama of humane motion : sadness, passion, bewilderment, pride, suspicion, amusement, exhaustion – all the faces of the night.”
Despite challenges early in life, Allah managed to maintain discipline and focus on self-improvement. He credits these qualities, in part, to the teachings of The Five-Percent Nation, a movement whose name comes from its concept that only five percent of the world knows the truth about existence and is dedicated to enlightening the rest of the world. Founded in Harlem in the 1960s the movement emphasizes intellectual growth and enlightenment for black men in particular.
Inspired and empowered by their message Allah seriously pursued the study of metaphysics, black history, and literature. He taught himself how to use a camera from videos on YouTube and later devoured books at the library on the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, and Bruce Davidson. The works in this exhibition, while distinctly his own, reveal his knowledge of these forbears. They also fit with the philosophies that he internalized from The Five-Percent Nation, using photography to enlighten us to the possibilities of humanity, especially within a community that remains largely invisible to many. In keeping with that perspective, he has referred to his photographic work as his “camera ministry.”
Khalik Allah
March 9 to May 12, 2018
Gitterman Gallery
41 E 57th St
New York, NY 10022
USA
