Dawoud Bey, a professor of Photography at Columbia has been named a 2017 MacArthur Fellow. Dawoud is a photographer and educator whose portraits of people, many from marginalized communities, compel viewers to consider the reality of the subjects’ own social presence and histories. Through his expansive approach to photography—which includes deep engagement with his subjects and museum-based projects—Bey is making institutional spaces more accessible to the communities in which they are situated.
During a residency in 1992 at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Andover, Bey embarked on what would become an ongoing series of portraits of high school students. He made his artistic practice more public and accessible, involving the students in shaping their own representations and working in a semi-public studio. The resultant large-scale, multiple-image works are powerful expressions of the youthful subjects’ respective individualities, still in the throes of being formed and negotiated. Bey expanded on this project in Class Pictures (2002–2006), a body of work produced in collaboration with young people and institutions throughout the United States. In addition to playing a role in the construction of their psychologically rich portraits, the students provided written texts about themselves to accompany Bey’s photographs of them, creating another layer of evocative self-definition. The exhibitions, public programming, and educational outreach Bey conceived as components of Class Pictures turned the museum into a vehicle for creating a closer relationship between institutions, youth, and the communities they inhabit.
More recently, Bey has focused on the construction of collective history and memory. In The Birmingham Project (2013), he commemorates the lives of six children killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and its aftermath in Birmingham, Alabama, through a series of portraits of Birmingham residents whose ages correspond either to the ages of the children in 1963 or to how old they would have been fifty years later in 2013. In another recent project, Harlem Redux (2014–2017), Bey returns to the site of his first project, Harlem, U.S.A. (1975–1979), but in this instance he focuses on the urban landscape and its transformation spurred by gentrification. Through his own work and long-time commitment to educating and mentoring young artists, Bey is redefining the role of photography and portraiture as active agents in the examination and formation of communities.
Dawoud Bey talks about the Harlem on my Mind Exhibition of 1969 with Black Art In America
