Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

In most of his writing, Deleuze condemns photography for being inevitably figurative and narrative. He rejects the medium from the realm of art, associating it instead with science’s homogenization of difference and becoming. By focusing not on the representational content but on the vibrant surfaces of the photos in Khalik Allah’s Souls Against the Concrete (2017), I contest Deleuze’s use of “photography” as a term of abuse, seeking to bring the medium into an aesthetic regime that moves beyond symbolic determination and thus beyond codified systems of thought. Souls comprises portraits of the migrant population of a street corner in Harlem, taken over several years, shot at night. The subjects appear from the darkness as reflective surfaces, being brought into visual being by the minimal light coming from the actual setting: streetlights, shop windows, a car’s headlights. The lens brings their faces into its field of vision. The film, developed in darkness brings the image to the surface, from negative to positive, a vibrant surface of affective energy. A specific space and a particular period in time determine the contours of the subjects’ photographically captured beings. Yet the multiple planes on which these moments surface also escape representational conventions and that which Deleuze calls the “representational image” of thought, generating powerful instantiations of perceptual, and hence, aesthetic becoming.