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Ajamu on the Pleasures of the Darkroom
In his home studio the artist explores pleasure, privilege and how ‘through our body, we bring our archives’
Ajamu is many things: photographer, archivist, sex activist, filmmaker, elder, Trekkie. Since the 1980s, he has sought to use sensuality and desire as methods to play with fixed notions of the self and bounded understandings of the body. ‘If people come and think Ajamu’s work is simply about identity and representation,’ he reflected in his studio in Brixton, south London, ‘then they haven’t engaged with it.’ ‘The work of Black and brown artists often gets locked down into a discussion of social and cultural identity,’ he continued. The artist uses sensation and sex to bypass these conversations, drawing on the history and process of photography to explore ‘what I want to do and what I want to have done to my Black body’.