Jibril: We’re in Paris right now. We moved here on the 16th of January after living in LA for seven years, so we’re kind of re-establishing everything—all of our work and projects. We’re working on a photo series that we realized would be better for us to be settled in Paris to finish. 

Jibril: We’ve been out here putting things back into place as much as we can because of the coronavirus. We’re getting back to work now but we had a hard period between getting settled and not doing too much because we were in a really tight confinement here—you needed documents to go outside. Now, things are getting back to normal little by little. 

Mo: After living in LA for a while, I’m curious about others’ resonance with it. What was it like for you both since you were 18 when you moved there?

Jalan: We went there to study film; that was the main thing. We lived in St. Maarten in the Caribbean and our idea was to go back to America. We lived in Miami when we were really young so we were excited about being back in America. Really, that was our mission: to get there. So we went back to study film and we decided on LA because we only knew Miami.

Jalan: It was amazing in the beginning. It was a new discovery and it was a breath of fresh air coming from the Caribbean and being in America—everything, from the opportunities, the people, the conversations we were having. For a moment in time, it was really fresh for us. As time passed on, as the seven years accumulated, we felt like we needed culture. There was a lack of culture for us in LA. But then it was also fun and at the same time I think it was the repetition of what we were doing. We had learned in LA we were ready for something new. 

Jalan: It was great in the sense that it really did open us up to the art world. There were a lot of artists that would show work in galleries or even musicians. It went a bit deeper than what we were exposed to in St. Maarten, and we learned a lot about designers. We worked at a fashion clothing store called Union Los Angeles and when we were there we were able to sit and look at really expensive clothes and see how it was treated. Sometimes we would go into fashion stores before and all of the clothes seemed really precious and untouchable.

Jalan: By the time we were done working at this store we felt like all of the fashion stuff that we had been exposed to didn’t feel as precious, but it also gave us an in to see how it was made, how it sold. We didn’t want to attach ourselves too much to fashion because of the recycled side of it. But in terms of textiles and how far you can go with that, we got really interested in that way. 

Jalan: I guess if we could sum it up it was almost like a form of art school. We would meet kids who actually went to art school and we would ask them questions about photo techniques, ways to work, and everything. We learned a lot about photography. We studied cinema for two years so we got an associate’s degree. We didn’t learn too much there. 

Jalan: From the friends and people that we met, it felt like we were in a school. It informed us a lot but at some point we felt like we were very much in a world of young artists. LA has a lot of potential for young artists so to us it almost sterilized that kind of bohemian, carefree energy that we thought artists would have, not even in America, but in a community of artists. We assumed that everyone would be sort of carefree but I think right now there’s a lot of tension in terms of politics and what you can and can’t say. It being a liberal state, there started to be almost this code of ethics on how an artist should be. We thought that there’s things about that are very unproductive for an artist to explore their own personal curiosities. It was almost like the exact thing that an artist doesn’t want: limits on their ideas and what they want to talk about. 

Jalan: So we were excited about moving away at least to Paris because we were born in Paris but we didn’t really know it. We were excited about moving to a place that maybe has less commerce attached to art. People are still only doing it for the love of it and they don’t feel like they need to respond to a commercial outlet, which is what a lot of artists we felt in LA always had on their mind. And it’s good in a sense. It makes you ambitious, gives you an idea that you can live off of your art, and your art can reach a certain potential. We always would think about how Kanye West would do the Sunday Services. And when you see people doing things like that, you’re kind of like, “OK, we could do something that big one day.” I think it’s a balance, though. You get the American ambition and maybe the European patience. [all laughing]

Mo: What did you find the most challenging in LA, either communally or within your practice? 

Jalan: I think I’d have to speak on both. With our practice, in a simple sense, there were faces that we felt that we did not have an access to because we were getting more specific with the kind of Black faces we were looking to photograph. There are certain features that we find that are more present in African cultures. In Paris there’s a huge hub for West African communities and there are a lot of North Africans also, but we’re more interested in West African features, so for our practice, there are more faces for us to pick from here. 

Jalan: We had a little bit of a hard time finding people to photograph in LA. New York would probably be different but LA has a different aesthetic. Sometimes I would use the word “exotic,” for lack of a better term. I feel like it was maybe a little too exotic in terms of hairstyles that we would find. Hair was a big thing because we like really classical haircuts that almost don’t tie themselves to a period in time. 

Jalan: The community—that was the thing that we felt started to be lacking. With the conversations that were happening within the community, we felt like we knew what people were going to bring up, what they would accept to talk about; what they wouldn’t accept to talk about. At some point it felt like a territory that we had explored already in terms of the politics of whatever we were talking about. It was a good point of view for us to talk about, but I don’t know in our times right now… Jibril and I have been talking a lot about the idea that liberals are starting to form a new conservative form of speaking so a lot of conversation isn’t allowed and that is something that we were starting to feel a lot in LA. 

Jalan: Jibril and I like to add nuance to our conversations so we like to play devil’s advocate just to see how we can stimulate the conversation without people repeating themselves. It’s kind of like playing tennis with yourself. That’s something that we also really like Dave Chappelle for. He joked about being a victim blamer or something and I think he’s someone in general that likes to see both sides of the conversations, not necessarily that he is on any side, but just to have nuance for it to be of a certain level of complexity. I think a lot of issues that people bring up have a lot of complexity, so I think that’s always good to keep that as an idea when we’re talking. 

Jibril: I would also say that in terms of the art community in LA, it was really well-formed and one of the exciting things that was happening, especially amongst young Black artists, there was a whole scene that was based around the Underground Museum and it was a really cool thing to see. We saw it grow more and more as the years passed by. 

Jibril: The only thing for us is that we started to almost disassociate with it aesthetically in that we realized that it was very African-American based. We realized that African-American culture is really influenced by Hip-Hop and potentially American sports and the case of civil rights for African-Americans in America, which goes down to slavery and such. It was really interesting to learn about those things, and we started looking back at our past. Our parents are from the French Antilles—the French Caribbean Islands—and we were born in Paris, so we were more influenced by what might be in the French Caribbean and Africa; in terms of Africa, it was probably more West Africa and Central Africa. 

Jibril: We were inspired by a lot of the music that was happening there so we almost escaped American sensibilities that we were seeing happen in LA. It had happened so much that we started to ask ourselves, “Is this really the best place to be inspired by?” Because we were getting more inspired by what we were seeing happening on the internet rather than getting inspired by, like Jalan was saying, the conversations, the actual things that were happening in LA. 

Jibril: We would come in and out of Paris over the years and we started realizing that Paris can almost work as a really great hub for Africa. A lot of flights end up passing through Paris to get to Africa or vice versa and we realized there’s a huge community here. Randomly enough, most end up finding apartments in this neighborhood called Château Rouge. It’s the African district in Paris and it’s been insanely inspiring and exciting for us to be in this neighborhood. It’s actually the complete contrast of what we felt was missing from LA to what we are experiencing now. So it was an exciting move for that, too, because we are now regaining that artistic community that we actually feel inspired by.

Mo: It’s interesting you talk about the contrast between the spectrums of Black culture. You’ve probably witnessed people go, “OK, that’s a Black artist photographing Black characters,” where they kind of lump it into one space while not realizing the nuance; without realizing that, oh, there’s a difference between Western African culture and Eastern African culture, Northern African culture, etcetera.

Mo: People have been so dismissive, consciously or not, to the multitudes of Black culture; they lump it all into one place. I’m assuming that’s a conversation you’ve had to navigate around. 

Jalan: I think, and maybe this will happen in time, that it’s really important to bring complexity or diversification because I feel like Irish culture and Italian culture are very rarely mistaken to be the same things, so I think that in time it’s going to be very clear for people to say that, “oh, that’s West African,” or something that’s from the Ivory Coast compared to something that was made in Somalia or Ethiopia. It is exciting to see that a lot of artists are helping to make those gaps clearer in our times because I guess more Black artists are having spaces to create and I think it’s really necessary. 

Jibril: That’s why we started to disassociate with the African-American artistic narrative that was happening in LA. For that simple fact, is that we realized that we can’t just group this whole idea. I understand the idea of the word “Black,” but sometimes I almost felt like it was problematic. I’ve heard African-Americans argue that Blackness is not a monolith but they sort of are the ones who nurture that concept a lot, that Blackness might be a monolith because it’s so often they use that word so loosely. Black this, Black that. When you look at what’s explained when Blackness is portrayed, it’s usually very African-American. So that’s been something I’m noticing. Blackness just meant something different for us. Even that word I’ve been trying to use less and less. It’s us trying to self-identity rather than grouping [this] into some sort of ideology of what Blackness might be. 

Jibril: We’re realizing how although we’re French Caribbean and we’re influenced by a lot of Central and West African and East African cultures, we are noticing that in terms of self-identity, that we do have a lot of occidental ways about the way we live. And we don’t want to neglect them because in America we started noticing that it was very popular to go, “everything that influences me is Black.” Jalan and I, we’ve been speaking about it, and I think it’s really important for us to acknowledge that a lot of the community we are surrounded by has been influenced by European aesthetics, their culture in general, and that there’s beauty to that; there’s mastery; there are lessons to be influenced by and we want to find a way to have that be involved in the art that we make. 

Jibril: Although we photograph Black figures, in this personal photo series that we are working on right now, we really want to acknowledge the other forms of design that we’ve seen outside of African culture. When we worked at this store in LA, we learned a lot about Japanese design because that was the majority of the brands they kept. That influenced us a lot. There was this concept of wabi-sabi that’s really influential towards Japanese design, and that alone is really important for us to cultivate and incorporate into the work that we make and not just have it be a hyper-African concept. It’s about universality and finding a way to incorporate the world on a global scale, but it is mostly inspired by the African diaspora, but it doesn’t neglect the fact that the French make the finest clothes or that the Japanese are really good ceramic workers, as an example. [chuckles]

Mo: It’s understanding the intersectionality of lineage, the thoroughline of people’s culture.

Jibril: Yeah, because with my brother and I’s lineage, the fact of the matter is that we were born in Paris so when we’re living here now, and our parents, our mom, she had spent 10 years living in Paris so when she was raising us, she wasn’t just teaching us how to make yams. [all laughing] She was talking to us about French pastries or anything of the like, so that can influence our character as well, and we don’t want to neglect it because complexity enriches someone. It’s important to never neglect your complexity. 

Jibril: Jalan and I have been talking a lot about our fear for the loss of complexity and nuance in these political times. While we understand that marginalized people need to be heard and need to be acknowledged, we shouldn’t move too deep into an extreme leftist concept because we’re really against anything that becomes too radical or extreme. I think that’s the beauty of humans, that we’re sort of poetry in the flesh, so I’d hope for us to not lose ourselves in the history that we’re about to write.

Mo: What’s fascinated me with your guys’ practice is the ability to use different mediums and different mechanics of those mediums to communicate these narratives. Was that something that was the aim during the inception of your career? Or did you realize it in hindsight?

Jalan: Yeah, we can source it back to curiosity. Jibril and I have this tendency to see somebody do something and then we really want to do it and try to do it as good as they do it. At every stage of whatever we’re doing, it starts off with a simple curiosity of seeing someone creating work and going, “oh, OK, now we should try to do this.” Before, we’d do this without even knowing that we were doing this, but when we look at someone’s work we’ll start to do a lot of research as to what techniques they use to do that particular work. 

Jalan: With photos, in particular, we were in film school and we were bored in an editing class and Jibril had started Googling these photos and he found these pictures and they were really, really good pictures.

Mo: Do you remember what those photos were or who they were by?

Jibril: They were fashion images by Harley Weir and Tyrone Lebon. 

Jalan: Yeah, and I don’t know how he found them but when we saw the images we didn’t even know that they were shot on film because to us, at that time, we thought the best picture you could take was on digital cameras. That’s us coming from the Caribbean and not knowing that much about the techniques of making photos. When we asked around, people were telling us, “yeah, that’s shot on film,” and we slowly got introduced to the idea that they were created in the darkroom and we were like, “OK, cool, we’ll have to do that now.”

Jalan: Through that curiosity, we got really into clothing and we started noticing that certain pieces of clothing photographed better than others. For example, linen. It looks great in real life, but on camera it’s actually really choppy in terms of texture, so if you don’t steam it or iron it, it really shows, compared to polyester, silk, or nylon that flows really nicely. Those are more photogenic so in terms of that curiosity, we were like, “cool, now we’re curious about having clothing that has painterly textures”. Now, we’re kind of getting into this place where we're buying fabrics and having guys sew things for us because we know we have to make that piece photogenic. So to answer your question, we let curiosity guide us into whatever it is that we want to create, which has made it to a place where we use different mediums for different things. 

Jibril: A bad trait that our parents would tell us to get rid of. [all laughing] We both really remember our grandmother always yelling at us and telling us that we were too curious because we would ask about gossip and what they were talking about. They said we used to touch things too much in stores and stuff like that. That’s the earliest part of curiosity. In our teenage years our mom started to try to nurture our curiosities because we made a bucket of newspaper soup one time when we were like four-years-old.

Mo: Wait, newspaper soup?

Jibril: Yeah. [all laughing] Our mom was more inclined to nurture that curiosity when it started to lead us towards something more lucrative and interesting. [chuckles]

Mo: Did it come to a surprise when you told them, “OK, we’re gonna take this formal education in film.” What was that conversation like?

Jalan: Both of our parents had a really opposite point of view.  Our mom was like the factory of our curiosity. She was super down to see what we were interested in and for us to exercise it and develop it. Our dad, on the other hand, was more traditional because he was your classic—I hate to use the generalized version of your typical Black dad—but he’s a lawyer and to him, he extracted himself out of whatever was happening in the Caribbean where his family comes from. He lived in the country and went to Paris and really made something of himself in a more expected professional way.

Jalan: I think he would have been psyched if we told him that we were going to become lawyers, [all laughing] but when we told him that we wanted to be chefs—the first thing we wanted to be we were cooks—that was strange but he kind of accepted that we did that. But with our mom, when she saw that we wanted to make films she told us, “yeah you guys should just do that, why be chefs?” She knew we liked being chefs, but she really saw that we loved making videos so she was super down. So when we told it to our dad it was more of a, “that’s completely unrealistic to me, why are you guys doing this?” In a weird way when we look back on it, it was a good combination. It was the mom who tells you to keep moving then there’s also the dad that you want to live up to and prove to. 

Jalan: We wanted to prove to him that we made the right decision, which can be toxic in many ways as well. But to us, it’s having that curiosity and drive of Michael Jordan. We can’t be the bench player of the photo world. It was very clear to us that we had to distinguish who’s the Michael Jordan of the photo world compared to being the benchwarmer of the photo world. That fueled a bit of ambition and now we’re trying to remove that side of our ambition and keep it towards more of an exploration of our curiosities, so that we’re not doing it to prove to someone. And that’s kind of a battle within because I can definitely say that it’s still in me.

Mo: I resonate with the dichotomy of parents. My mom has always been supportive of my creative pursuits. I always joke maybe it’s because she watched enough Oprah.

Jalan: Definitely! [all laughing] 

Mo: I’ve definitely faced that dichotomy of views from parents, though. My mom’s past jobs, like being an airline stewardess, contributed to her sense of curiosity, whereas my dad, when he immigrated to the states, led himself into a more linear, pragmatic profession in tech. But the more I speak to artists, specifically artists who are Black, I feel like this tension is more attributed to being in a world where there’s not a lot of people who look like you that pursue the same practice. There’s a lot of artists who are Black out here, but it almost feels underground in a way. And sometimes I have to remind myself to reword, “Black artists,” into, “artists who are Black,” because of the pressure that might put on their practice. Romare Bearden has talked a lot about that. He once wrote:

Mo: Nonetheless, operating in this photographic practice means operating in a predominantly white male medium. So going into this thing that you’re deeply curious about, this thing where many of the people and perspectives you don’t resonate with, it might activate a sort of survival mechanism that shares the same mechanics with, say, a parent that doesn’t completely get it.

Jalan: Yes, it definitely feels like that, like a game. It kind of gamifies the whole thing and I guess, whether the game is toxic or not toxic, I think every artist who’s ever done something, it does become a sort of tennis game. You’re trying to prove yourself to someone in a strange way and get points from them.

Mo: How did you start to discuss not needing to prove something? It’s interesting because when you signed to CLM, combined with all of these things happening at the same time, there was probably a lot of external pressure there, right? 

Jibril: I don’t really know where this came from but Jalan and I, for the most part, we’ve had an internal confidence between the two of us about what we want to do and what it should look like. The quality of standards is not for the world, it’s just the quality standard between the two of us. When I say “between the two of us,” it does not mean that it’s the best in the world, it’s just the best we think we can do. And I feel like we’ve always been really confident and determined that it should stay in that space. There have been pressures from outside sources, but we live in a way that we know the dangers of being inspired, or letting that dictate the path of your life. So we’ve always known how to remove ourselves and not be too pressured. 

Jibril: When I think about it, we did, actually. Even getting into photography, Tyrone Lebon did a really big step to help us get to where we are at right now. We had a conversation with him where he hinted at a few things that were like, “be careful in this industry, don’t get swallowed,” type of thing. Based on the little that he said, we were able to observe how true it was, that a lot of photographers were sort of swallowed by commercial inhibitors to their work that didn’t allow for their creativity to grow in quality.

Jibril: We were able to look at the industry based on what he had said and it helped us get a certain caution towards the industry so we’ve always known what and what not to do but we still make mistakes obviously. We’ve done projects where we’ve regretted it but we know not to do too much of that and to stay focused in our microcosm of the Durimel world where we’re mostly in control and we’re not letting the industry dictate what we do next.

Jalan: Yeah, I want to add to what Jibril was saying. We’ve set a standard, which has helped because if you do something bad and you do it alone, you’re kind of hiding within yourself. You can lie to yourself and stay within that space and kind of live a lie, but it’s something else when come Monday morning you have to go talk to someone and say, “hey you said that this is the lie that we didn’t want to subscribe to but let’s do it anyway.” And then either one of us will be like, “we just said we’re not going to do that.” I think that accountability has been huge. 

Jalan: We’re even now trying with our friends to be a system of accountability for them. We’ve realized the simple outlet of telling someone. If you’re in a group of people and they know something’s nonsense, you can’t just go tell that same group of people that you’re going to interact with that nonsense. And we’ve noticed a lot of great artists have had that critique that’s constantly being like, “it’s going to be hard but let’s try to live up to that standard that we set.” Taking it slow has been a big part of that. That, and analyzing while almost staying in a workshop mode. We always differentiate between practicing and—

Jibril: —performing.

Jalan: Yeah, practicing and performing work. I think with a lot of artists, especially with commercial photography, it has to be released. You can’t just say, “oh, we’re going to shoot this Nike thing,” and then not release it if you don’t like it. I think commercial photography does this thing where you're practicing in public and there’s a good thing about that—practicing in public—but I think an artist has to have that safe space of creating something and being allowed to not release it. I think a lot of photographers, in the beginning, the outlets aren't at your doorsteps; you’re not being offered to them.

Jalan: If someone is creating at their university for fun, and they don’t show it, at some point in time they can be so attached to projects that have to be released where everything is out in public and it goes too fast. Financially, it’s beneficial. There’s this whole thing that Jibril and I talk about where photographers have an attachment to the financial backing that a lot of other artists probably don’t have, which is a great thing, but knowing how to say no to that is also really important. 

Mo: How do you guys harmonize your own personal perspectives while balancing that with this world?

Jalan: We’ve had the benefit of having really similar interests because we’ve grown up together. It comes naturally. Our art schooling is the same and our culture is the same, too. But growing up we have noticed that we have differences. Learning to give each other space to exercise the differences is something we’re really, in the past year I’d say, trying our best to do. Because we’ve realized as much as you have that person to tell you when you’re doing bad work, it can also hinder you from exploring your curiosity and making an honest mistake. 

Jalan: The harmonization is a work in progress that we’re still trying to figure it out right now. But we do have the huge benefit of it being pretty aligned. I’ll see a nice pair of shoes on the streets and I’ll take a picture of it and show it to Jibril. I think eight out of ten times he’ll like it. And then there are those two out of the times where he won’t, and it’s weird because we have this expectation of being super in sync so that when we’re not in sync it’s like really unsettling, it makes us a bit shaky. We’re trying to get more comfortable with that—being OK that we’re more different. It’s weird. When Jibril and I talk, it’s almost like a government. We’ve gone to therapy and have read all kinds of books. [laughing] We almost see it as an art piece itself, the harmonization, actually. That’s like a painting we are working on. 

Mo: And for you, Jibril?

Jibril: I will add to what Jalan was saying in the beginning which is that thankfully we’ve had the same sort of schooling, very informal but, the same schooling of aesthetics so there’s a certain standard that I think is really similar between the two of us and that allows for us to be excited about really similar things. 

Mo: Are there circumstances where one would solely go off to explore an idea and then come back with the information from that? Do you give yourselves the space to explore ideas individually?

Jibril: We’ve learned to. [all laughing] In the past few years, we’ve noticed when an idea has been sourced from one person. Now, we live separately which is really good for us, but we used to birth ideas in the same space, in the same room, and by the time 20, 30 minutes passed, we'd completely forgotten who even came up with that idea. That can be really problematic because the ownership of that idea is totally lost and it’s really hard to track down who came up with that idea, who should be paid the respects to develop that idea or who should govern that idea. So it’s been really important for us to solidify a concept even though it’s not extremely formal or fully bodied. It’s been important for us to prepare concepts, explain it to each other on a deck instead of being like, “oh, I thought of this.” But it’s easier said than done. 

Jibril: Ideas are super exciting. I think ideas for an artist are gold. If you live off of art they’re literally gold in the sense that you can probably monetize an idea. So when we come up with an idea it’s exciting; it’s like you just struck gold so you want to talk about it. You want to let it out, but we’ve noticed that it’s important to sometimes present it more correctly because it’s harder than you think for someone to understand what you are talking about. That goes back down to relationships in general. 

Jibril: When people get close we have this tendency to assume that somebody else knows what we are talking about and that can lead to a lot of problems in terms of communication if you’re not verbalizing very clearly. That’s what vocabularies were made for. You can start to explain very clearly what you are talking about. And it takes time to even come up with the correct vocabulary to explain, so going off on your own on the side—trying to prepare—has become very important for us. 

Mo: Can I assume that communication is the most important aspect of your partnership?

Jibril: Definitely. I would say that’s crucial from the time you’ve accepted that you are in a partnership, which I don’t think that a lot of partners even do. It kind of flows and you’re in a partnership, whether it’s a romantic couple or a working couple. A lot of time you end up in one and you don’t realize that communication is going to be the leading factor that will dictate whether it’s going to be a healthy relationship or a toxic relationship. So it’s important to come to a place, which is what Jalan and I kind of have. A few years ago we realized that from the time you’re in a partnership you’ve entered a dialogue; you’ve entered into a conversation.

Mo: So who’s the better DJ in this partnership?

Jalan: [laughing] I would say Jibril’s a better DJ, but I’m going to change and also say, I think he has a better tolerance for listening to a song he doesn’t like. I can’t—I have a hard time. He can listen to a good amount of songs that he doesn’t like. Jibril has great songs, he should send you a playlist. [all laughing]

Jalan: We talk a lot about how the color palates of our photos are like the melodies to a song. Recently, I started talking to Jibril about Sade, and I almost had this kind of epiphany about carefree, easy music because at one point we started manipulating the sets, the clothing, and the casting in our photos a lot. Everything started to become really effortless, so I thought we needed to bring back this sort of sexy, easy feeling, and when I thought about Sade it clicked. The music sounds like they’re kicking it on a hammock, like they really don’t care, but then you go into [the process] and you find out they actually do care about the mechanics behind the whole thing. That was something we needed to get back to—the Sade-like photos.

Jalan: It’s been fun to see what quality means in different disciplines and trying to link it back to whatever we’re doing and the sexiness of it, to me. There’s probably a better word for that, [laughing] but I like this idea of having something be sexy, very graceful, careless, and effortless. 

Mo: One thing I’ve been hyper aware of lately is my atmosphere. Everything we interact with visually, sonically, and tangibly can provide a sort of exercise for one's practice, right? How do you guys exercise your personal life into your practice?

Jibril: It’s the life you live. You need to live a beautiful life to make beautiful work. We once heard this guy say, “that to write a beautiful story you need to live a beautiful life,” or something like that. Thankfully enough, Jalan and I have grown up in multiple places that were pretty culturally different. We were born in Paris but we left when we were two-years-old so we didn’t live here much. 

Jibril: Our first memories of childhood are in Guadeloupe and then we moved to Miami from four to 12-years-old. So we had Miami, which is extremely Hispanic, as a party place in a sense. Then we moved back to St. Maarten for high school which is a half Dutch-half French island and then we lived in LA the past seven years. So thankfully, almost by default, we’ve lived a really colorful life. Now that we’ve learned about the richness of that, we’re trying to cultivate it even more. You don’t want to force something, but how can you color your life even more? 

Jibril: I always like the idea that whatever you surround yourself with you slowly become that. Sometimes that becomes such an exciting thing for me to think about because with the internet nowadays, I’ll just listen to Ethiopian music straight for a week, and see what that does to me; what it might inspire in terms of color palette, in terms of a drawing or something like that. It’s almost like you take the arts as a drug. In a sense, you almost like sniff it like cocaine. [all laughing] You “sniff,” on Ethiopian music and see what that does to you. 

Jibril: We’ve had a really in-and-out relationship with drugs and certain substances. We haven’t really done anything crazy; just smoke weed, drink alcohol, and mess with psychedelics—

Mo: —as one does in LA. [all laughing]

Jibril: We try to be careful about how much those things influence our life because we realized that life itself can be extremely influential on your psyche and that alone is fun for us. Jalan’s learning the guitar now so he’s been making music. His relationship to the guitar and melodies is enough to stimulate an entire visual art piece, so it’s finding a way to color your life and make it more dynamic and rich. That’s been exciting to learn about because now we can cultivate it some more. Moving to Paris has been that for us [too]. 

Mo: It’s interesting to think about this moment we’re in right now, this influx of attention on non-white communities. What excites you and scares you about this moment we’re in right now in photography?

Jibril: What scares me about these times in photography is that this idea of Black photography becomes really tokenistic. I’d like for Black artists, artists of color, marginalized artists, to be acknowledged for the quality of their work first and foremost rather than the group that they come from. Even if it’s done kind-heartedly, it could be really dangerous to acknowledge artists solely based on the social class that they come from for two reasons. One main reason is that we think it could allow for really bad quality artwork to be acknowledged which then lowers the bar of artists in the Black community. I think it’s extremely important for us to cultivate the best artist’s and not have them [solely] gain notoriety for their social class. 

Jalan: I think a lot about Usain Bolt in a metaphorical sense. I don’t want to be given the trophy. I would like to be allowed to run the race. And I think with Usain Bolt, it’s like, OK, he’s allowed to run the race, but then it’s really his own effort to bring him to be a winner. He’s allowed to be there and he does his thing. It’s partially due to the Olympics opening it up to all Black athletes, but it’s also Usain Bolt individually who marked his space in that arena. 

Jalan: As for exciting? There are so many things exciting that I could say, but I think right now there’s a sort of a renaissance. I think people are going to look back at 2010 onwards to 2020. The internet is changing and shaking things up so much that to me it’s an inspiring time to make good work. I’ve been talking to Jibril about this idea that it seems that someone invented a MP3 player for pictures—for visual art—so now if you do make great pictures, they can reach great people in the quickest time possible. I think it’s something that can fuel an artist a lot right now. It’s exciting to think that my song can probably have the reach of Frank Ocean’s music or my photo can have the reach of a Sade song. 

Jalan: Basquiat apparently once told Madonna that he envies her because music has such a wider reach than his paintings ever will have, and I think that’s something so exciting to think of, that we can make something in Paris and have it reach Japan in minutes of time. That’s something Jibril and I have been really fueled by. We’re very much like pirates and little bohemian artists on one end, but we like to think of the marketing and potential of distributing your art on the other hand. If we play our cards right we can really express this to a lot of people. It can be fun. It’s like the theatre is full with the world right now. 

Jalan: We talk a lot about sensory delight. At one point, we wanted our work to be very political. We tried to do it and maybe it came from fear, but I don’t think it was birthed naturally.

Mo: What was the fear?

Jalan: We saw other artists in museums who were publishing work, and when we decided to transition from fashion photography and try to attack the fine art world, we saw that a lot of the work there was linked to political issues so we thought our work had to have some sort of political backing—it needed to say something. It’s funny because it ended up going 360 in terms of when we discovered impressionism. We knew of Picasso but when we looked at his work again we had this idea that maybe it doesn’t have to be political. Looking at a lot of the impressionist painters in that whole movement, we saw that they were making paintings simply for sensory delight and it almost gave us a right of passage to be like, “this work doesn’t have to say anything.” For us, that would be our best contribution to the art world or to culture in general.

Jalan: It’s the approach that almost a chef has; make a good shrimp or make a good dessert. Certain restaurants obviously have ambitions to say something more political, but we love the world of chefs because it’s simply to impress someone’s taste buds. In a way of being unpolitical, it gets political, but we feel like if we can make a beautiful color palette and have a photo that makes someone sort of radiate within, that’s our job. 

Jalan: When we tried to get really political from a false standpoint, there was something healing to us in terms of accepting our mediocrity. We accepted that we didn’t have anything to necessarily add and that we maybe had a lot to learn. So learning, whether it be through podcasts or books, there was something really freeing about that. It’s accepting yourself as not that great, because I think that’s almost the first jump to actually becoming great and being comfortable with yourself. You don’t have to be a warrior. You can be in the process of learning how to wield your weapon. Maybe one day we will become super political or something but as of now, it’s sensory delight and good music.

Jibril: I’ll add to what Jalan is saying. It’s kind of based on the idea of coloring your life. After seeing different cultures and living a colored life: what has it done for us? What we want our photos to do is color someone’s life. Sometimes we feel like we find ourselves more at home in terms of philosophy rather than politics. So what we’d like to do, like Jalan is saying, is make sensory delights that simply make someone feel good. But that might not be in style right now because the time is extremely politically tense.

Mo: Maybe it needs it now more than ever.

Jibril: Possibly. Sometimes we feel like it’s almost a subtle fight, like it’s not even political. If there will be anything that’s kind of political about our photos, we want them to be Robert Mapplethorpe quality images, but they’ll just be of Black characters.