The stretches of Solange’s and Sampha’s improvised grooving that follow the choreographed sequences present not an interruption but an easy crescendo.
In “Don’t Touch My Hair,” each scene falls into a loose, unhurried narrative, linked by tone. Jafa’s artistic presence is immediately felt in the Solange videos.
After “Daughters,” he shot Spike Lee’s “Crooklyn” but never again worked with the director, instead going on to direct his own short films and documentaries, including the unapologetically imagistic “Dreams Are Colder Than Death,” in 2013-a meditation on black America and the legacy of the March on Washington that featured artists and thinkers such as Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Hortense Spillers, and Charles Burnett. “Lemonade” gave Dash an overdue introduction into mainstream black popular consciousness, and perhaps Solange’s videos will do the same for Jafa. In 2016, “Lemonade,” with its images of black women in white dresses on the beach and in old-fashioned lace dresses on a Southern-style porch, made use of that same language to articulate Beyoncé’s Louisiana Creole and black Alabama origins-and her own self-determined future. The film creates a powerful, expressive visual language rather than offering up tropes and shorthand.
Solange dont touch my hair artist painter skin#
Interestingly, Dash chose indigo-stained hands, instead of lash wounds or cotton-pricked fingers, as the physical mark of slavery in the film-no matter that, in reality, indigo wouldn’t stain the skin permanently. Together, Dash and Jafa created colorful, lasting images of black people who wear Victorian dress and commune on beaches and in forests. He won Best Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival for his work on “Daughters,” a film that, through fact, fiction, and experiment, tells the story of a black Geechee community off the coast of South Carolina that must decide whether to leave its isolated, culturally-rich world behind and move to mainland America. Jafa has described how his career as a cinematographer went downhill after “Daughters of the Dust” because of the creative restrictions of working within the studio system for strong-minded auteurs. It was the cinematographer credits that struck me: Ferguson is listed along with Arthur Jafa, who is best known for his work on Julie Dash’s seminal 1991 film “Daughters of the Dust,” which was in turn a big influence on Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.”* I first came across the videos on Solange’s Web site,, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that Solange co-directed them with her husband, the music-video director Alan Ferguson (clean, crisp angles), and collaborated on art direction with the Spanish photographer Carlota Guerrero (the muted, feminine desert aesthetic).
They weave in and out of expectation, neither over-conscious nor hyper-defiant they manage to be exactly what they want to be. When we are shown a tableau of black men with delicate perms dressed in green sweatshirts, or Solange painted gold and sitting poised on rock, these scenes are neither an unambiguous nod to “the ancestors” nor a catalogue of blackness. The videos are similar not only in their individual parts-clothes, color palette, choreography, mood, and even melody-but as whole experiences.
There is one for “ Don’t Touch My Hair” that features the throaty baritone and presence of the British electronic-music producer Sampha and another for “ Cranes in the Sky”-a song that hits with a cathartic, weightless chorus that may send a listener into a round of leaps, pirouettes, and earthly affirmations. Why must Beyonce and Solange be compared? They’re walking in different lanes and have totally different career paths! Beyonce is expanding on the legacy that she’s built! It’s 20 years later and to continue seeing growth from an artist of her caliber is unheard of (in most cases)! Beyonce could have easily remain stuck in delivering songs like Single Ladies/Crazy in Love and ‘Lemonade’ could have been avoided altogether.A few days after Solange Knowles released her first album in eight years, “A Seat at the Table,” she dropped two new music videos.
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