Deviant Darkrooms: Photography, Sadomasochism, and Black Queer Ecstasy

Deviant Darkrooms examines the processes of Ajamu X and Rotimi Fani-Kayode, two Black queer London-based photographers, showing that their experiments with darkrooms develop an erotic method to challenge what Black feminist scholar Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman describes as “the awful now.” By embracing historical trauma in an erotic encounter, Ajamu and Fani-Kayode use what I term “transtemporal eroticism” to develop a Black queer world. Through the creation of the photograph, the development of the archive, and the performance of sadomasochism, they engage in a process that creates alternative ways of being. This article explores the process of the darkroom, rather than its result; the act of creating the space to develop the “deviant” photograph and erotic experience through an encounter with darkness, as opposed to the representation presented in the light of the image and the sexual subject. I argue that the two photographers combine play and melancholy to create a Black queer archive of feeling, a Black queer ecstasy, upending Enlightenment and colonial senses of history and humanity that assert Black non-being.