VISION
COCKSURE
Why is Western culture so fearful of images of dicks? Art photographer Ajamu X has made it his life’s work to find out. In the process, he’s charmed the pants off a lot of men! Ian Horner reports.
London artist Ajamu X (above) photographs penises for a living. He’s so good at it he was hired to do just that for Britain’s Channel 4 documentary Me And My Penis, now streaming worldwide.
In it, Ajamu talks to eight very different men about their dicks – and photographs them soft, hard and inbetween. This made history in Britain, becoming the first time erections had been shown on public TV.
“I’m sick of all the taboos,” laments Ajamu. “We Brits are the most repressed people in Europe. Why are we so afraid of the dick? We should be talking about men’s emotions, feelings, traumas and the pleasure we get from our dicks. Let’s break open that taboo and talk about everything that goes into being masculine and men and male.”
Fighting words.
He was born Carlton Cockburn in a claustrophobic West Yorkshire town. Six years after coming out he moved to London “to breathe”. Ajamu Ikwe-Tyehimba is the name given to him by his mentor in the ’80s and the name of his Facebook page. Ajamu X is his artist-activist name, evoking Malcolm X and the black activists of the ’60s. His family still call him Carlton.
Ajamu (say “Ar-JAH-mu”) explained to DNA how he wins the confidence of the models who give him such evocative, provocative shots.
The eight different stories of Me And My Penis are each compelling and honest, and are some heartbreaking. Ajamu’s approach rewrites the rulebooks about men and our dicks and that has proven controversial…
DNA: It would’ve been easier to be young and gay after you left West Yorkshire and moved to London, right?
Ajamu: So true! Huddersfield is a very small town with one gay club, the Gemini. Like most towns, people don’t fit in for lots of reasons. For me it was how I dressed. I was post-punk and goth, black nail varnish, mascara, Tucker boots, frilly shirts. Us black guys were marked as different. Then my sexuality kicked in and we had to run from the small town to the big city to breathe. I got to London at 24, in 1988. I’d come out at 18.