Solange, Stanley Kubrick and Jay-Z

“I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music.” —Arthur Jafa

Film director, cinematographer, visual artist, university lecturer and writer – these are the different roles in which the uber-talented Arthur Jafa creates work and connects with the world. We rounded up some of our favourite Jafa projects to share with you as a primer for his talk at the AGO on May 30 (tickets are on sale now) as part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

Jafa made his cinematography debut with the seminal 1991 Julie Dash film Daughters of the Dust, winning the award for Best Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival. Daughters of the Dust recently gained a whole new audience when it was cited as a major reference for Beyoncé’s groundbreaking visual album Lemonade. Jafa went on to collaborate with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut and Spike Lee on Crooklyn.

More recently, Jafa worked as a cinematographer on two Solange music videos, Don’t Touch My Hair and Cranes in the Sky, which were directed by Solange and her husband, Alan Ferguson. Vanity Fair called both videos, which were international hits, “gorgeous pieces of modern art in motion.”

Jay-Z’s 2017 video for “4.44” was directed by Jafa, Elissa Blount-Moorhead, and Malik Sayeed. The 8-minute video moves between two dancers and a collage of images of black life. The style of that video echoes Jafa’s video piece Love is The Message, The Message is Death, which was shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary art in 2017 and which The New Yorker called Jafa’s “crucial ode to black America” and stated it should be “required viewing.”

Don’t miss Jafa on stage here at the AGO at 7 p.m. on May 30. To purchase tickets and find out more about the event, visit the AGO website.

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