Many of Shabazz’s childhood friends made up this underground economy. The primary vision was to save our people.” His mission was to mobilize those the Black Panthers referred to as the “lumpen proletariat”-gangsters, pimps, and sex workers-who were most vulnerable to labor exploitation, drug addiction, and homelessness. Shabazz proclaims, “My journey has never been about wanting to be a photographer. The 35mm camera that he had learned to use in the army would be key to his revolutionary arts ministry. No longer enticed by the lures of street life, Shabazz wanted to create real change in his community. “I came home a revolutionary,” he recalls. He became something of an ethnographer, translating the subversive spirit of the Black poets he was discovering-Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Amiri Baraka-as he manipulated the camera’s aperture and shutter settings.Īfter one tour in the army, Shabazz returned home to Brooklyn, in 1980, a changed man. He snapped pictures of everything he saw and tasted as he moved through Germany. So it’s through that experience that they brought home photographs.” Shabazz’s Canon AE-1 became his closest companion. Because for them, they were getting away for the very first time. “For practically everybody who was in the military, a camera was the biggest thing to have. He followed the lead of an older Black soldier who carried his camera with him everywhere he went. In 1977, a seventeen-year-old Jamel Shabazz was assigned to a post just outside Stuttgart, Germany. To escape the brewing trouble that was ensnaring many Black boys in Brooklyn in the waning years of the Black Power movement, Shabazz made the decision to enlist in the army as soon as he could. He flipped through it so often during his adolescent years that the book had fallen apart by the time Shabazz reached high school. Leonard Freed’s Black in White America (1968) was among Shabazz’s favorites. “ National Geographic, Life magazine-all those publications informed me.” Shabazz, who had developed a serious speech impediment when he was quite young, discovered that while he struggled to communicate verbally, he could get lost in the worlds of his father’s books and album covers. “My father had a really vast library of books, and I would go through every single book he had in the house,” he remembers. Books on politics, photography, and culture were neatly organized on a massive wall of shelves. In the early ’70s, the Shabazz home in Red Hook was alive and buzzing with the funky sounds of Marvin Gaye, the Jackson 5, and Earth, Wind & Fire. When examined as a whole, Shabazz’s brand of portraiture cannot, and perhaps should not, be characterized simply as street photography or fashion photography. “I freeze time and motion.” It is as if this moniker were a new revelation, the result of now having the time and space to reflect on his odyssey into professional photography. “I think I’m an alchemist,” Shabazz tells me. Jamel Shabazz, Rolling Partners, Downtown Brooklyn, 1982 Those frozen bits of time still elicit the same delight, pride, and awe as they did in the ’80s and ’90s. Within seconds, likes and comments from his one-hundred-thousand-plus followers of all ages, from around the world, start flooding in. Then he posts them on his Instagram, sometimes with an accompanying music track, sometimes not. Shabazz will spend the next eight hours meticulously sifting through the box, rediscovering faces and city landscapes that he had forgotten even photographing. This is a new routine that has become the only consistent thing in uncertain times. It is an archive so vast (which even contains the negatives belonging to his father, who was also a photographer) that when asked about the quantity, Shabazz replies, “I just can’t give a count.” He carries the box into the center of his work-space floor. One box, just like the others, holds bits of time frozen on negatives, slides, and photographic prints. They are organized chronologically and then subdivided by type: black and white, color, medium format, and so forth. Hundreds of identical boxes line every available space in his home. He survived the 1980s crack era and the AIDS crisis, when so many friends from his Brooklyn neighborhoods-Red Hook and then East Flatbush-did not.Įvery morning, while living under quarantine, Shabazz saunters into one of the several closets in his home and picks up a heavy archive box. It is a calendar of loss with which he is intimately familiar. The globe-trotting photographer Jamel Shabazz is tucked away in his Long Island home, his “sanctuary.” Shabazz’s world is rocked daily by yet another phone call announcing the death of a loved one. Many are scared to even leave their apartments to buy groceries. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the metropolis to a standstill.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |