Pictures of gay men locked in chastity devices by black men
![pictures of gay men locked in chastity devices by black men pictures of gay men locked in chastity devices by black men](http://www.dhresource.com/f2/albu/g8/M01/5A/4F/rBVaVF02pLqAYPJuAAJZovZwhKk473.jpg)
- #PICTURES OF GAY MEN LOCKED IN CHASTITY DEVICES BY BLACK MEN ARCHIVE#
- #PICTURES OF GAY MEN LOCKED IN CHASTITY DEVICES BY BLACK MEN SERIES#
Haringey Black Action poster, 1985, from rukus! archive project. The Homecoming shows the different spaces – a flat shared with his lover, the streets of Brixton, his mother’s sitting room – in which Ajamu’s sexuality was not just accepted, but celebrated. James, in the same building that housed the radical magazine Race Today (1969–88).
![pictures of gay men locked in chastity devices by black men pictures of gay men locked in chastity devices by black men](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61RmQd-DUrL._AC_SX425_.jpg)
On the way to Brixton station, Ajamu passes both the former home of Rotimi Fani-Kayode – the late Nigerian British photographer whose images of queer Black men are a kind of preface to Ajamu’s own – and that of the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. It follows the artist on a journey from London to visit his mother in Huddersfield, where he is having his first institutional solo show. Yet, as its title suggests, the film also attests to the importance of home in Ajamu’s work. That such leading figures were commenting on Ajamu’s work so early in his career is testimony to the instant impact it had on Black British art. In The Homecoming: A Short Film about Ajamu (1995), the works draw the reflections of Sonia Boyce, Stuart Hall and Kobena Mercer.
![pictures of gay men locked in chastity devices by black men pictures of gay men locked in chastity devices by black men](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/cd/54/91/cd5491b6956ef3c9eb0a65956dd9e77f--strong-women-high-heels.jpg)
Photographs like Cock and Glove (1993) – a close-up black and white shot of a lace-gloved hand holding an erect penis – were central to discussions of photography and desire in 1990s Britain.
#PICTURES OF GAY MEN LOCKED IN CHASTITY DEVICES BY BLACK MEN SERIES#
Always shot in black and white, his portraits also illuminate the objects his sitters use to incite their desire: the pointed shoes squeezed on under muscled calves in Heels (1993) or the leather harnesses, whips and thrones in the series ‘Circus Master’ (1997–98).Ījamu, from the series ‘Circus Master’, 1997, photograph. Ajamu studied photography at first, in part, to fill its pages, before beginning the studio portraiture of Black and brown queer men that remains at the centre of his practice today. Malcolm X was his first role model and his revolutionary politics informed BLAC (Black Liberation Activist Core), the magazine Ajamu co-founded in Huddersfield in 1985. He adopted the name Ajamu, which means ‘he who fights for what he believes’ in Yoruba, in 1991. 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’.Ījamu was born in the northern town of Huddersfield in 1963, to parents who moved to Britain from Jamaica in 1961. ‘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. 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. Ajamu is many things: photographer, archivist, sex activist, filmmaker, elder, Trekkie.