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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. \u201cIt amounted to a lot, but I was a failure.\u201d His own directorial ambitions remained largely unrealised. A parallel career in art had come and gone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw what success looked like. Basquiat was a success. Spike Lee was a success. Boyz n the Hood<\/em>\u00a0was a success. There was a lot of success going on, and I was in the midst of it but not capable of replicating it.\u201d<\/p>\nThat 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<\/em>, a film about racial identity that managed to be abrasive, ironic and magnanimous.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/picture>Still from Arthur Jafa\u2019s \u2018The White Album\u2019<\/span> \u00a9 Arthur Jafa. Courtesy of the Artist<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nFrom \u2018The White Album\u2019, Jafa\u2019s 2018 film about racial identity<\/span> \u00a9 Arthur Jafa. Courtesy of the Artist<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nHis breakthrough had come three years earlier with Love is the Message, the Message is Death<\/em> (2016), a seven-minute compilation of found clips that amounted to a portrait of contemporary Black America. Set to Kanye West\u2019s gospel-influenced rhapsody \u201cUltralight Beam\u201d, the footage cycled rapidly between civil rights marches, music videos, episodes of police brutality, Barack Obama singing \u201cAmazing Grace\u201d following the Charleston church shooting, and countless other fragments of lives \u2014 many of them disarmingly random. The film ended with James Brown collapsing on stage in ecstatic exhaustion.\u00a0<\/p>\n\nMy drive is to make things that are epic and dense and knotty and Black \u2014 but at the same time\u00a0completely refuse any sort of reductive idea of what Blackness is<\/p>\nArthur Jafa<\/footer>\n<\/blockquote>\n\u201cMy drive is to make things that are epic and dense and knotty and Black \u2014 but at the same time\u00a0completely refuse any sort of reductive idea of what Blackness is,\u201d 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. \u201cThere\u2019s a certain part of it that\u2019s my own psychohistory, very particular to me, but there\u2019s another part that\u2019s structural.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
We are sitting in Jafa\u2019s 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 \u2014 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<\/em>, showing Jimmy Cliff as the gangster Ivanhoe Martin. The modernist fanatic and the folk hero: it\u2019s a small example of the \u201caffective proximity\u201d (a phrase coined by Jafa\u2019s friend, John Akomfrah) that the artist is fond of. Each picture reframes \u2014 subtly inflects \u2014 the other.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
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Jafa in his LA studio\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.<\/span> \u00a9 Peyton Byrne<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
.\u2009.\u2009. alongside postcards and small prints of paintings and portraits<\/span> \u00a9 Peyton Byrne<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nJafa (AJ to those who know him) speaks with a polymathic range that mirrors the nature of his work. \u201cI constantly cite music as the model for almost everything I\u2019ve done. It\u2019s the most prominent example of Black Americans having a cultural impact.\u201d And yet, he points out, Black music is uncategorisable. It is in constant flux. \u201cEveryone knows what you\u2019re 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.\u201d <\/p>\n
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 \u201crecalcitrantly segregated\u201d Clarksdale. He found himself moving regularly between the two \u2014 his mother\u2019s family were mostly in Tupelo. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to grow up in an environment like Clarksdale, but it\u2019s another to be fluctuating back and forth. It was a mindfuck, basically. I felt alienated everywhere.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
When he was 10, he saw Stanley Kubrick\u2019s 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>. It was an epiphany, although it seems to have underscored his sense of alienation. \u201cIt quite literally blew my mind,\u201d he wrote in his 2003 essay \u201cMy Black Death\u201d. But he was struck by \u201ca whiteness that\u2019s sterile, creepy and ultimately seductive\u201d.\u00a0(As fate would have it, Jafa was hired decades later as a second-unit cameraman on Kubrick\u2019s final film, Eyes Wide Shut<\/em>, 1999.)<\/p>\n\n
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Preparatory notes in Jafa\u2019s West Adams studio, alongside paints and thinners<\/span> \u00a9 Peyton Byrne<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
A cut-out photo portrait of Little Richard, taken in 1975, is used to create a 3D piece in Jafa\u2019s studio<\/span> \u00a9 Peyton Byrne<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\nTo get to almost 50, and be looking in the mirror, saying: \u2018Where did all that potential go?\u2019 It\u2019s frightening. I do feel like I was tested<\/p>\nArthur Jafa<\/footer>\n<\/blockquote>\nAs a teenager, Jafa collected pictures obsessively. \u201cImages were a way to fix where I was, to fix a moment.\u201d He compares their potency with that of a song lodged in the mind. Even now, there\u2019s a Stevie Wonder record that he won\u2019t listen to because of its visceral power to transport him back to Clarksdale and \u201cthe kinds of things I was feeling\u201d.<\/p>\n
He left home at 17 to study architecture at Howard University, Washington. \u201cWhat I was interested in, architecturally, was very much the same thing I\u2019m interested in now. If Kind of Blue <\/em>was a house, what would it look like?\u201d But architecture proved a dead end: the opportunities weren\u2019t there. \u201cMost Black people didn\u2019t own their own homes. They weren\u2019t commissioning people to make experimental architecture.\u201d<\/p>\nArthur Jafa with his best friend, the music critic Greg Tate, who died in 2021<\/span> \u00a9 Courtesy of Arthur Jafa<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWhile still at Howard, he began going up to New York. His closest friend, the music critic Greg Tate (who died in 2021) \u2014 \u201cthe love of my life\u201d \u2014 had moved there to write for the Village Voice. \u201cHip hop, rap, all that shit was just starting. It was the beginning of the explosion. The mushroom cloud hadn\u2019t quite formed, but you could see it.\u201d Even after moving to Los Angeles and then Atlanta in the mid-1980s, Jafa kept returning.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 <\/em>(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 \u201cdeclensions\u201d) to capture the characters\u2019 transition from an African past into an American present. It\u2019s a theme that has remained important. \u201cThe central ontological fact of Black life is that we arrived as Africans and at some point we became Black.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\nJafa was cinematographer and co-producer on \u2018Daughters of the Dust\u2019 (1991), a film directed by his then wife Julie Dash<\/span> \u00a9 Cohen Media Group<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nSubsequent projects included John Akomfrah\u2019s Seven Songs for Malcolm X <\/em>(1993) and Spike Lee\u2019s Crooklyn <\/em>(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\u2019t achieve critical mass.<\/p>\nThe hiatus that followed was painful. \u201cTo get to almost 50, and be looking in the mirror, saying: \u2018Where did all that potential go?\u2019 It\u2019s frightening.\u201d At his lowest point, he called his father and went back to Mississippi for a month. \u201cI do feel like I was tested. I was battle tested. I was reduced to almost nothing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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<\/em> (2013), which he reconceived as a cinematic essay on the long aftermath of the march. \u201cMy pitch was crazy, and we just ran out and did it \u2014 fast.\u201d <\/p>\nStill from \u2018Love is the Message, The Message is Death\u2019 (2016)<\/span> \u00a9 Arthur Jafa. Courtesy of the artist<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nPresident Barack Obama addresses an African Methodist Episcopal church event, in a still from \u2018Love is the Message, The Message is Death\u2019 (2016)<\/span> \u00a9 Arthur Jafa. Courtesy of the artist<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nA separate commercial venture that he wasn\u2019t happy with gave rise to Love is the Message<\/em>. \u201cI looked at it for a day and said, \u2018this is boring as hell. I\u2019m just going to do something else.\u2019 I had all this footage, and I put Love is the Message <\/em>together in two hours.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\nJoseph screened Jafa\u2019s film at Art Basel, where it was seen by the dealer Gavin Brown<\/a>. 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. \u201cAnd we\u2019ve just been running ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n\u2018Iggy\/Patti\u2019 (2025) by Arthur Jafa, shown at Sadie Coles<\/span> \u00a9 Arthur Jafa; Photo: Katie Morrison; Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u2018Cobain\u2019 (2025) by Arthur Jafa, also shown at the artist\u2019s Sadie Coles exhibition<\/span> \u00a9 Arthur Jafa. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nJafa\u2019s 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 \u201cprimordial\u201d impulse. Miles Davis is a touchstone. \u201cI identify with his introspectiveness, his demonic drive, the darkness in him.\u201d If John Coltrane represents uplift, as epitomised by A Love Supreme<\/em>, then Davis is the antithesis. Jafa has taken this duality as the starting point for his exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, GLAS NEGUS SUPREME<\/em>. Two new films will focus respectively on Michael Jackson and Pete Townshend \u2014 \u201cfigures I\u2019m obsessed with\u201d \u2014 themselves poised between uplift and darkness.\u00a0<\/p>\nAs he nears his 65th birthday, Jafa is on a roll. He\u2019s 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<\/em>. Later this year, he will curate an exhibition from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. \u201cI spent the first 30 years of my adult life with that conception of failure,\u201d he says, now with a flicker of humour. \u201cWhich means I\u2019ve got to live another 20 years in order even to counterbalance it.\u201d<\/p>\nOctober 10-November 29, <\/em>sadiecoles.com<\/em><\/a>moma.org<\/em><\/a><\/p>\nFind out about our latest stories first \u2014<\/em> follow FT Weekend on<\/em> Instagram<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Bluesky<\/em><\/a> and<\/em> X<\/em><\/a>, and <\/em>sign up<\/em><\/a> to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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