Photo by Cynthia Berkshire Installation by Yayoi Kusama
Jahmani is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, photographer, and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the compelling diverse cultural beauty, mystery, wonder, shadow and impermanent aspects of what it means to be a human, spiritual, and embodied being, within our surreal, multi-racial, intergenerational, socially and politically convoluted and conditioned society. His work blends documentary and poetic experimental forms, pushing the boundaries of nonfiction storytelling and examining the many dimensions of who we really are, how we see and perceive ourselves, one another, and the nature of reality within and beyond our individual and collective existence and unseen world.
Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2026, A Journey into Awakening and Remembrance is Jahmani’s ongoing poetic photographic work and developing photographic, film and soundscape installation and photo book. This portrait and street reportage work explores the interior lives and impermanent world of everyday New Yorkers, navigating the city’s unpredictable and chaotic streets. The images serve as both inquiry and celebration, honoring the diverse cultural beauty, mystery, wonder, vulnerability, joy, and the paradoxical nature of life in New York. Created within the context of a nation challenged and actively struggling to sustain it’s moral center, uphold it’s democratic ideals, and find a new path forward; the project reflects on memory, resilience and transformation. Asphalt Spirits NYC probes the emotional ties between New Yorkers across generations, where race, class, gender, identity, wealth, power, and culture intersect and collide. Revealing something essential that’s beneath the surface of everyday life, that’s elusive, fragile, and profound.
A Sony Innovator’s Award recipient for filmmaking, Jahmani’s films have aired on PBS/Thirteen WNET and have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, St. Louis Art Museum, The Kitchen, Lollapalooza Music Concert Tour, and Madonna’s Who’s That Girl Tour, among others. His short film, Why Am I A Threat?, featuring Ice Cube, was featured in BAM’s (Brooklyn Academy of Music) 2019 film series, Black 90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema, curated by Ashley Clark. Jahmani's 2010 documentary film Change You Can Believe In, features an unscripted conversation between playwright / actor Wally Shawn and political activist Andy Zee, addressing fundamental questions about human nature, morality, and the organization of society.
Jahmani has collaborated and worked on film and television projects with Oliver Stone (Nixon / film), Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer /television series), John Dahl (The Last Seduction/film), Orlando Bagwell (Matters of Race / PBS documentary series), and Bill Moyers, and Marc Levin (Rikers: An American Jail / PBS documentary film). He studied filmmaking at Pratt Institute, received a directing fellowship at the American Film Institute, and was a documentary fellow with The Gotham Project Involve.
Asphalt Spirits NYC debuted as a solo exhibition in 1983 at New York’s iconic Just Above Midtown / Downtown Gallery, curated by Linda Goode Bryant. Photographs from Asphalt Spirits NYC Part I: 1976-1986 + Part II: 1999-2026 are held in the private collections of Keith Haring, The Buhl Collection, Andy Spade, and others.