© Mustafa Davis
he sits with the silence, like an old friend
shadows holding the pieces, he forgot to name
There’s something about the way stillness tells stories louder than sound. I didn’t ask him pose for this image; the moment found itself—tired, unfiltered, and full of things we didn’t want to say. The shadows moved like memory, persistent, echoing things we wanted to forget. The photograph, though simple, is a conversation between grief and grace.
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That’s the rhythm of the photographer’s life—a quiet and anxious ache wrapped in pursuit. Always reaching for what will never remain. It’s a quest for the fleeting moment that barely forms before it begins to vanish. An attempt to hold still what will never be still. And even when you capture it—the moment dissolves the instant it’s touched, leaving behind a shadow of time. A photograph is never the moment itself. It’s a relic, a trace—something that says it was here, but can never say it is.
Read More“A bird flies over the Hagia Sophia Mosque at dawn in Istanbul.”
I’ve photographed this place many times over the past decade but these are my first images of Hagia Sophia as a mosque. It is one of the most magnificent structures I’ve ever seen mashAllah.
I shot the promotional photo for the Brother Ali “Live In Istanbul” New Years Day 2010 concert. We shot this in the Hagia Sophia Mosque in the heart of Istanbul.
I’m not a poet. I don’t speak with eloquence. So all I can do is share images that convey the way I feel and hope someone, somewhere hears these images screaming from my photographic digital prose... “We are not invisible. We are right here. Dying right in front of you as you close your eyes and proclaim you don’t see color.”
Read MoreSecrets & Escapes is a compendium of Brother Ali's time with Evidence over the course of three trips to California, recording in a Venice garage with no regard for pleasing the internet or competing with the music industry. Ev chopped up records on old-school samplers and ran them through a compressor (2 track) so they couldn’t be re-arranged or mixed. Brother Ali sat with the mic and spit rhymes as they came to him, without writing or organizing them into songs.
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