May 8, 2018
KHALIK ALLAH in COLLECTOR DAILY
By Loring Knoblauch
The durable power in Allah’s portraits lies in his unflinching willingness to connect, to take the risk of engaging with someone who may at first be rightfully fearful or defensive.
April 28, 2018
PICTURE FICTION:
Kenneth Josephson
and Contemporary Photography
April 28–December 30, 2018
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
April 26, 2018
KHALIK ALLAH in THE NEW YORK TIMES
10 Galleries to Visit Now on the Upper East Side
By MARTHA SCHWENDENER
The Art Deco Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street has historically been an art gallery hive. One of its tenants is Gitterman, a gallery devoted to photography and now showing the work of Khalik Allah, a young filmmaker and photographer
April 3, 2018
KHALIK ALLAH in THE FILM STAGE
New Directors/New Films 2018 Review by Jason Ooi
In just two films, he has developed and honed his incomparable style, providing the festival, and the documentary form itself, with one of the most memorable, intense experiences in recent memory.
March 28, 2018
KHALIK ALLAH in THE NEW YORK TIMES
BLACK MOTHER selected as one of
11 Movies You Need to Know at New Directors/New Films by A.O. Scott
Gliding from color to black and white, from digital to analog, from grim realism to spiritual ecstasy, the film offers a song of praise to the island of Jamaica and a reckoning with its painful history and hard-pressed present. Mr. Allah gathers a rich blend of voices, faces and natural wonders, a kaleidoscope in which shards of violence and poverty commingle with glimmers of dignity and resilience.
link to article
March 19, 2018
LOIS CONNER
Interviewed by George Slade in B+W MAGAZINE
What initially sends me out into the world is often a story, photograph or painting; some aspect of the world that haunts me because of its absolute unfamiliarity, its beauty or incomprehensible existence. Trying to render a visual encounter through photography is nearly impossible. Bending and twisting what the camera faithfully describes into something of fiction in order to give form and meaning to what exists in front of you. With the confluence of light, circumstance, chance and a dozen other factors I attempt to conjure up a world, one seemingly half-imagined and breathing with the life of histories.
January 29, 2018
KHALIK ALLAH in HUCK
Dark, soulful portraits of Harlem at night
Psychic x-rays
By MISS ROSEN
Khalik Allah takes to the streets of New York City, capturing the nocturnal locals of Harlem in a series of bold and beautiful images.
In the summer of 1998, Khalik Allah had come to a major crossroad after failing eighth grade. Dancing with a B-boy crew had been keeping him out late at night, and school had failed to interest him. Yet he understood the importance of educating himself. Concerned about his future, he headed up to Harlem and began to study with the Five-Percent Nation at the Allah School.
FULL ARTICLE
January 18, 2018
KHALIK ALLAH in THE NEW YORKER
A Filmmaker and Photographer’s Urgent, Personal Portraits of Harlem at Night
by Richard Brody
These images—of people, mainly black people, many of whom endure drug addiction, physical infirmities, poverty, homelessness, and harassment from the police—have an essential documentary urgency. They also have a spiritual essence, an element of passion and grace that’s revealed by Allah’s compositional grandeur and textural intimacy—but these revelations of style arise from his own experience, which he also details in the book, in an extraordinary personal essay, “Camera Ministry.” In the essay, Allah—who has an exhibition opening at New York’s Gitterman Gallery, in March—discusses his first enthusiasm for filmmaking, in the late nineteen-nineties, as a teen-ager from Long Island, at the same time that he began to frequent Harlem, to study the work of the Five Percent Nation, and to become friends with members of the Wu-Tang Clan. He discusses the happenstance of his sudden interest in photography at a time, in his early twenties, when he had put his filmmaking on hold. It’s a story that involves his family, but, above all, it involves his relationships with the people whom he photographs, as well as with other people whom he encountered on the street.
full article
November 28, 2017
KHALIK ALLAH in THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
By LUC SANTE
The result is a panorama of human emotion: sadness, passion, bewilderment, pride, suspicion, amusement, exhaustion — all the faces of the night. “Time is over, and the world has ended,” Allah writes. “Only the Light continues.”