Dawoud Bey is an African American photographer and professor of art at Columbia College Chicago who explores race through portraiture. He was born in 1953 in Queens, New York, and earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art. He was inspired to become a photographer after a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he saw the controversial exhibition Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968 at age sixteen. He later recalled of this experience, “I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask the information desk where the exhibition was. I just walked around the museum, pretending that I knew where I was and hoping I would find the exhibition, which I did. It was a very transformative experience. Seeing photographs of African Americans on the wall of a museum…began to give me a sense of what I might do with the camera.”[1]
Bey’s first exhibition entitled Harlem, USA was presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979 and featured black-and-white photographs taken between 1975 and 1979. This exhibition is an interrogation of Black people as the subject of photography wherein Bey is bringing humanity to a conversation that is typically centered on pathology.[2] He revisited Harlem in the 2014–16 Harlem Redux series, with color photographs that focused more on place than on people in order to capture the commodification of Harlem’s culture for tourists and gentrifiers.[3]
Additionally, Bey interrogated the meaning of community in his series Strangers/Community (2010-2014). For this series, he photographed strangers who may not have otherwise met. He recounts, “All communities contain social hierarchies that determine who will actually interact and who will not within that special space.”[4] Another series, Class Pictures (2007), includes photographs of teenage students from around the United States.[5]
PMA Collection
PMA Library
References
Grant, Vera Ingrid. 2017. Harlem, Found Ways. Cambridge, MA: Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art.
Obrist, Hans Ulrich, and Alison Cuddy. 2019. Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art.
Sims, Lowery Stokes. 2015. Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston: MFA Publications.
Endnotes
[1] Quoted in Obrist and Cuddy 2019, 124; see also Grant 2019; Sims 2015.
[2] Grant 2019; Obrist and Cuddy 2019; Sims 2015.
[3] Grant 2017.
[4] Quoted in Obrist and Cuddy 2019, 128.
[5] Sims 2015.
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