Shot in sumptuous monochrome, Isaac Julien’s award-winning film Looking for Langston (1989) is a lyrical exploration of the private world Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967) and his fellow black artists and writers who formed the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s. Directed by Julien while he was a member of Sankofa Film and Video Collective, and assisted by the film critic and curator Mark Nash, the 1989 film is a landmark in the exploration of artistic expression, the nature of desire and the reciprocity of the gaze, and would become the hallmark of what B. Ruby Rich named New Queer Cinema. 

Film-Noir Angels (Looking for Langston Vintage Series), is one of a series of photographs taken at the time of filming Looking for Langston. This large-scale photographic work is, in essence, a rendering of the visual components that might be missed in a fleeting filmic image.

Throughout his career, Julien has worked simultaneously with photographers and cinematographers to make still and moving picture artworks. Working with Nina Kellgren (cinematographer) and Sunil Gupta (photographer), Julien shot Looking for Langston in the 1980s in London but set it in the jazz world of 1920s Harlem. His use of low-key lighting and sculptural smoke further complicate historical periodisation, infusing the work with a 1940s film noir feel. The imaginative combination of epochs creates a kind of ‘creolisation’ of photographic forms as well as a potent and self-conscious timelessness. While Julien was directing the film, he paid close attention to the photographs of James Van der Zee, George Platt Lynes and Robert Mapplethorpe, and it is possible to see a direct relation between images imbued with references to the history of 1930s black-and-white African American photography and 1980s Queer cultures.

Looking for Langston was made when the AIDS crisis was at its height and several of its actors died after the film was made. For Julien, the photographs act as ‘memorial sites’. Sometimes they reveal facts behind his fictions and explore the creative process, at other times they zero in on a portrait or go deeper into a moment of contested history. Whatever the case, Julien is unapologetic about his pursuit of beauty and the importance of visual pleasure as an entry point to any exploration of subtextual issues.