plug: Urban Rashomon + Antonyms of Beauty (2013)
"Everything that we see is life."
Today’s plug is a double feature of 2013 shorts by director Khalik Allah. A street photographer by trade, Allah combines black and white photography with video, film, and running sound to create, as his intro on The Criterion Channel suggests, “dreamlike drifts through the margins of society, gritty and sublime portraits of the disenfranchised and dispossessed that, in their infinite compassion and philosophical insight, achieve an almost spiritual transcendence.”
The kind of “spiritual transcendence” that Allah captures in these shorts is something you can only achieve by finding and celebrating the undeniable humanity in your subject. In Urban Rashomon, Allah reflects on his relationship with photography subject Frenchie, a homeless man living on the streets of Harlem. Over the course of the short — a collage of still photographs, scant video, and Allah’s voiceover narration — we get a serious look at the line between exploration and exploitation that defines an artist’s relationship with a human subject. There’s a point where Allah recognizes the need to transform his approach in order to do his subject justice, and it’s quite stunning when you see it in real time.
“My photography isn’t about being pretty,” says Allah. “It is very much about beauty. It is very much about truth. It is very much about goodness. But the last thing it’s about is being pretty.”
Where Urban Rashomon is primarily focused on Allah, his relationship with Frenchie, and his point of view; Antonyms of Beauty widens the scope to capture Frenchie’s every day surroundings and community on the Harlem corner of 125th street and Lexington Ave. Allah takes on the role of interviewer rather than narrator, and in so doing he captures the community through Frenchie’s eyes and paints a stark, beautiful, human portrait of American life as lived by America’s most dispossessed. Both Urban Rashomon and Antonyms of Beauty are marvels of photographic cut-up technique and guerrilla filmmaking that will (hopefully) bring a permanent shift in perspective out of anyone who watches them.