Saddi Khali, a journey through the lens

It’s not often one encounters someone who is as in tune with the Universe as it is with them. Poet, hip hop artist, phototherapist Saddi Senghor Ibin Abo Khali is one such spirit.  He listens and the Universe listens back.

Named after Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegalese statesman and poet, this Son of Khali grew up in a household that was always deeply rooted in being African.  “At home, the lion was the victor” so when society told the story of black Americans as the conquered and from the viewpoint of the “hunter”, his art became his defiance. 

Khali questioned this system that tells black people that Jesus was white and that man was made in the image of God, or images of beauty as tall white and slender, even though the women in his household were “soft”. 

Khali wanted to feed black people new images of themselves, because “I was raised on an African model of art, that art is not art for the sake of art.  It has an everyday use and practical purpose that affects people on a regular”.                                                                     

Khali was born in Queens, New York and moved to New Orleans at the age of two when his parents separated.  He was home-schooled until the eighth grade then went to Willard University to study writing.  Having always had issues with the idea of formal education, he left Willard to pursue an independent career as an artist, first, by seeking out the people whose work had always inspired him so as to have them critique and help grow him as an artist. 

He met teachers like E Ethelbert Miller, Tom Dent, Amiri Baraka and Keorapetse Kgositsile but soon realised that he could not survive on writing alone.  Along with getting his work published and performing (both poetry and hip hop), he began to take on other jobs, such as teaching and ghost-writing.

It was actually through ghost-writing for various hip hop artists that Khali was able to buy his first house.  He was able to use his understanding of hip hop, hooks and popular culture to tell stories that he could not ordinarily tell as himself, and this later began to become a source of conflict for him.  “So by day I’m thisrevolutionary poet and teacher then at night I’m in studios with linen pants but a gun in my pants”.

Disenchanted by this double life, but still deeply in love with how good art felt for him, he began to find ways of reconciling his personal with hip hop and poetry.  One such display of this reconciliation is his poem, Platinum in two days, in which he, ironically, says: 

“I’m gonna write a song that,

ain’t bout sh*t that,

don’t mean sh*t that,

sound like sh*t. 

And I’m gon’ see if ya’ll gon’ buy my sh*t,

gon’ bump my sh*t, gon’ fly my sh*t...”  

Sometime during this need to make art feel good again Khali began mentioning to a number of people that he would like to try out photography, to which Tom Dent lovingly responded by giving him an old film camera (a Pentax K1000).  But photography didn’t come easily to him. 

It took about two years before Khali took what he thought was a decent picture.  “You don’t just call yourself a writer.  You write and people respond to your writing, then someone calls you a writer.  So I didn’t dare call myself a photographer.  I was just experimenting and people started responding and paying me to take photos and that’s how I realised I was a photographer.” 

Khali then came across Uwe Ommer’s Black Ladies and Thierry Le Goues’ Soul, books that showed black women differently, beautifully but as models, not as actual women.  For Khali, who began by photographing the women he was dating or friends with, he couldn’t shoot them without considering them, because they would continue t be in his space even after the pictures were taken.

As a writer, Khali always sought to access intimate emotions, so unlike most photographers, who he says try to take “pretty pictures”, he approached photography with a writer’s mindset.  “I wanted speak to you, affect you and challenge what you were seeing.  So whereas someone would take a picture of a woman and care about the picture, I care about the woman... And so I’m gonna shoot her with a certain sensitivity, connectivity and desire for her victory.” 

This became his method of photography, and how he developed the title phototherapist.  He decided he would only photograph people he had gotten to know, so each photo shoot is prefaced by a conversation to shed some of the fear and judgements he says we have learnt along this way called life.  He seeks to get to know these people, work through the insecurities and show them as beautiful.

Naturally, Khali faced some resistance for putting up naked pictures of women on MySpace and Facebook.  Khali believes that we are conditioned to fear judgement so we are guided by this fear.   Only when we allow ourselves to shed this fear can we begin to stop settling for the lives we live and begin to enjoy them. 

“What we know now that we are beyond the ages of our parents were when they had us is that all the stuff they don’t understand now, they understood then... But then they grew older and became more conservative...  All the things that you do that make you feel good, you got trained out of them with statements like ‘I was young and foolish’.” 

Khali also admits that his intentions have not always been clear so he did not always know what he should show and what he shouldn’t.  It was only through understanding that the issue was not nudity or the body, rather the face and the stories faces tell, that he began to realise that he was documenting people’s journeys.  “I don’t make money because no one wants to take naked pictures.  I make money because they do.  I just create a framework that says that this is not bad.  Creating a context of acceptance and discovering and celebrating what you’ve been taught was wrong.”

Part of his growth towards discovering his intentions as an artist came after Hurricane Katrina.  In 2005, Khali found himself displaced to New York, during his “Jesus year”, and two years later (almost to the day) he moved back to New Orleans.  Although Khali attributes his current success to his time in New York, he was suddenly a small fish in a big pond and found the disconnection of New York to be unbearable. 

From a city where people spoke and knew each other, and knew him, he was now alone.  In packed subways or busy streets, he was alone.  So he threw himself into his work then moved back to New Orleans, but has never really settled down (in the conventional sense of the word).

Khali tours non-stop, does not work from a studio and never does anything without “divining” it first.  He feels he is exactly where he needs to be, otherwise he wouldn’t be here. 

Whilst chatting to Khali, I asked him if carrying all these people’s spirits ever weighs heavily on him and he told me of different cleansing practices:  acupuncture, massages and a variety of Ancient African spiritual customs;  but not once did I ever get the feeling that he works, or that he can even separate himself from what he does.  This is life for him.  As the Universe intended.