The year that Arthur Jafa turned 50 was the worst of his life. For most of his career he had worked as a cinematographer, but he felt that his potential had been wasted. “It amounted to a lot, but I was a failure.” His own directorial ambitions remained largely unrealised. A parallel career in art had come and gone.
“I saw what success looked like. Basquiat was a success. Spike Lee was a success. Boyz n the Hood was a success. There was a lot of success going on, and I was in the midst of it but not capable of replicating it.”
That was 15 years ago. The intervening period has established Jafa as one of the most respected artists of his time. In 2019, he won the Golden Lion in Venice for The White Album, a film about racial identity that managed to be abrasive, ironic and magnanimous.
His breakthrough had come three years earlier with Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), a seven-minute compilation of found clips that amounted to a portrait of contemporary Black America. Set to Kanye West’s gospel-influenced rhapsody “Ultralight Beam”, the footage cycled rapidly between civil rights marches, music videos, episodes of police brutality, Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” following the Charleston church shooting, and countless other fragments of lives — many of them disarmingly random. The film ended with James Brown collapsing on stage in ecstatic exhaustion.
“My drive is to make things that are epic and dense and knotty and Black — but at the same time completely refuse any sort of reductive idea of what Blackness is,” Jafa says, leaning back in his swivel chair. Dressed in a T-shirt and shorts for the Los Angeles summer, he has an easy-going air that belies the precision of his words. “There’s a certain part of it that’s my own psychohistory, very particular to me, but there’s another part that’s structural.”
We are sitting in Jafa’s studio in the West Adams neighbourhood of LA, as he prepares for an exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in London this autumn. Nothing is finished, but he seems unconcerned. Across tables and fixed to whiteboards are found photographs — stacks and grids of them. A snapshot of an elderly Ezra Pound, staring out at the camera, lies alongside a still from the 1972 Jamaican film The Harder They Come, showing Jimmy Cliff as the gangster Ivanhoe Martin. The modernist fanatic and the folk hero: it’s a small example of the “affective proximity” (a phrase coined by Jafa’s friend, John Akomfrah) that the artist is fond of. Each picture reframes — subtly inflects — the other.
Jafa (AJ to those who know him) speaks with a polymathic range that mirrors the nature of his work. “I constantly cite music as the model for almost everything I’ve done. It’s the most prominent example of Black Americans having a cultural impact.” And yet, he points out, Black music is uncategorisable. It is in constant flux. “Everyone knows what you’re talking about, but you can stick your hand in a bag and pull out 10 names, and you would never confuse them with each other.”
Jafa was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1960, the eldest of four boys. His parents were teachers in a Black college. When he was six, his family moved from their moderately liberal town to the “recalcitrantly segregated” Clarksdale. He found himself moving regularly between the two — his mother’s family were mostly in Tupelo. “It’s one thing to grow up in an environment like Clarksdale, but it’s another to be fluctuating back and forth. It was a mindfuck, basically. I felt alienated everywhere.”
When he was 10, he saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was an epiphany, although it seems to have underscored his sense of alienation. “It quite literally blew my mind,” he wrote in his 2003 essay “My Black Death”. But he was struck by “a whiteness that’s sterile, creepy and ultimately seductive”. (As fate would have it, Jafa was hired decades later as a second-unit cameraman on Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, 1999.)
As a teenager, Jafa collected pictures obsessively. “Images were a way to fix where I was, to fix a moment.” He compares their potency with that of a song lodged in the mind. Even now, there’s a Stevie Wonder record that he won’t listen to because of its visceral power to transport him back to Clarksdale and “the kinds of things I was feeling”.
He left home at 17 to study architecture at Howard University, Washington. “What I was interested in, architecturally, was very much the same thing I’m interested in now. If Kind of Blue was a house, what would it look like?” But architecture proved a dead end: the opportunities weren’t there. “Most Black people didn’t own their own homes. They weren’t commissioning people to make experimental architecture.”
While still at Howard, he began going up to New York. His closest friend, the music critic Greg Tate (who died in 2021) — “the love of my life” — had moved there to write for the Village Voice. “Hip hop, rap, all that shit was just starting. It was the beginning of the explosion. The mushroom cloud hadn’t quite formed, but you could see it.” Even after moving to Los Angeles and then Atlanta in the mid-1980s, Jafa kept returning.
He was close to the art world in those years, but never part of it. As a cinematographer, he helped to instigate the New Black Cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s. He worked with director Julie Dash, his then partner, on Daughters of the Dust (1991), portraying three generations of Gullah women from South Carolina in 1902. His shooting, which won the Excellence in Cinematography Award at Sundance, employed differing speeds (what he has termed “declensions”) to capture the characters’ transition from an African past into an American present. It’s a theme that has remained important. “The central ontological fact of Black life is that we arrived as Africans and at some point we became Black.”
Subsequent projects included John Akomfrah’s Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) and Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994). By now Jafa was living in New York and mostly shooting documentaries, but opportunities for Black filmmakers were dwindling after the strides of the previous decade. He ventured into video art, painting and installation, but despite several successes he didn’t achieve critical mass.
The hiatus that followed was painful. “To get to almost 50, and be looking in the mirror, saying: ‘Where did all that potential go?’ It’s frightening.” At his lowest point, he called his father and went back to Mississippi for a month. “I do feel like I was tested. I was battle tested. I was reduced to almost nothing.”
It was Greg Tate who helped him initially, putting him in touch with a therapist whom Jafa credits with saving his life. Some TV work came his way and gradually he got back on track. Another friend, the filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, approached him about helping to make a documentary for German television on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Jafa ended up directing and editing the piece, Dreams are Colder than Death (2013), which he reconceived as a cinematic essay on the long aftermath of the march. “My pitch was crazy, and we just ran out and did it — fast.”
A separate commercial venture that he wasn’t happy with gave rise to Love is the Message. “I looked at it for a day and said, ‘this is boring as hell. I’m just going to do something else.’ I had all this footage, and I put Love is the Message together in two hours.”
Joseph screened Jafa’s film at Art Basel, where it was seen by the dealer Gavin Brown. Jafa was driving home from taking his son to school when he received a phone call from Brown, who wanted to show the film at his gallery in Harlem. “And we’ve just been running ever since.”
Jafa’s work has a rare sense of the epic about it. But behind its political and aesthetic ambition is something more wayward, or what the artist himself calls a “primordial” impulse. Miles Davis is a touchstone. “I identify with his introspectiveness, his demonic drive, the darkness in him.” If John Coltrane represents uplift, as epitomised by A Love Supreme, then Davis is the antithesis. Jafa has taken this duality as the starting point for his exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, GLAS NEGUS SUPREME. Two new films will focus respectively on Michael Jackson and Pete Townshend — “figures I’m obsessed with” — themselves poised between uplift and darkness.
As he nears his 65th birthday, Jafa is on a roll. He’s about to fly to New York to shoot for a collaborative project with the cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, Minor Music at the End of the World. Later this year, he will curate an exhibition from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. “I spent the first 30 years of my adult life with that conception of failure,” he says, now with a flicker of humour. “Which means I’ve got to live another 20 years in order even to counterbalance it.”
October 10-November 29, sadiecoles.com
November 19-July 5, moma.org
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