Abdul Aleem- Servant of The Most Knowing One.

As I have been reflecting, I have produced the framework in which my photography will exist. This framework is structured around my Islam and my being Black on the American soil and along the diaspora, Alhamdulliah (All praises to The Most High). 

Through my own experiences of being both Muslim and Black, the intersecting core principles of these two beings, is one being truthful- also known as “keeping it a bean” as the Black community would say, and two wanting  for your brother or sister what you would want for yourself or as we know it to be amongst Black folk,, “making sure we all eat”.

 With that said, my pratice of photography uses the Muslim name, ‘Abdul Aleem’- servant of The Most Knowing one, as a guiding light for the approach to my work. My thought process is that if I am being a servant of the Most Knowing One, it is my obligation as a Muslim, as a Black being, as an historian and educator to: 1.) Observe, consciously,  2.) historicize, honestly, and 3.) educate, authentically. 

The intentions of my photography and myself is to share and express the creations that Allah (God) has put in front of me. It should be stressed that when I am  photographing, I am not ‘taking’, ‘capturing’, ‘shooting’ or ‘making’ anything , rather I am merely sharing or relaying what it is that Allah has blessed me to see.

 In volume one of The Black Photographers Annual in 1973, Toni Morrison explains, in her foreword, that the work of these selected Black photographers serves as, “a true book that hovers over the matrix of Black life, [taking] accurate aim and explodes our sensibilities.” In other words, the work is and should always tell the true and honest accounts of Black folks’ ways of knowing and doing. Everyday that I choose to walk the streets of Philadelphia with my camera- as Gordon Parks refers to it as being ‘ his choice of weapon’- I am deciding to deliberately articulate, in its purest form,  the matrix in which Black life finds itself in the 21st century.

As salaamu alaykum- 

كريم

(Karim)