Dawoud Bey

The inspiration for the project stems from Roy DeCarava’s (1919-2009) dark photography.

The exhibition title was inspired by a line from a poem titled ‘Dream Variations’ by Langston Hughes.

Dawoud Bey (born David Edward Smikle; November 25, 1953) is an American photographer, artist and educator known for his large-scale art photography and street photography portraits, including American adolescents in relation to their community, and other often marginalized subjects.

A product of the 1960s, Bey said both he and his work are products of the attitude, "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

This philosophy significantly influenced his artistic practice and resulted in a way of working that is both community-focused and collaborative in nature.

The 1963 FBI report states that the bombing killed 4 children; Addie Collins, Carol Robertson, Cynthia Wesley (all aged 14) and Denise McNair (age 10) as well as injuring 16 other people.

2 African American boys, James Johnny Robinson (age 16) and Virgil Ware (age 13) were also killed by police in racially motivated attacks after a resulting segregation rally.

Each photograph in the project is a juxtaposition of two portraits of Birmingham residents.

One of a person the same age as the victims when they died and the other of an adult the age of the victim should they have survived.

These diptychs are accompanied by a split-screen video titled ‘9.15.63’ which recreates the journey of a car-ride to the church from the perspective of a child.

The video shows locations “charged with significance for the black community in Birmingham during the Civil Rights era—a schoolroom, a lunch counter, a barbershop, and a beauty parlor”.

Born David Edward Smikle in New York City's Jamaica, Queens neighborhood, he changed his name to Dawoud Bey in the early 1970s.

Bey graduated from Benjamin N. Cardozo High School.

Bey's earliest photographs, in the style of street photography, evolved into a seminal five-year project documenting the everyday life and people of Harlem in Harlem USA (1975–1979) that was exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979.

He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1977 to 1978, and spent the next two years as part of the CETA-funded Cultural Council Foundation Artists Project.

During the 1980s, Bey collaborated with the artist David Hammons, documenting the latter's performance pieces - Bliz-aard Ball Sale and Pissed Off.

Over time Bey proves that he develops a bond with his subjects with being more political.

The article "Exhibits Challenge Us Not to Look Away Photographers Focus on Pain, Reality in the City" by Carolyn Cohen from the Boston Globe, identifies Bey's work as having a "definite political edge" to it according to Roy DeCarava.

He writes more about the aesthetics of Beys work and how it is associated with documentary photography and how his work shows empathy for his subjects.

This article also mentions Bey exhibiting his work at the Walker Art Center, where Kelly Jones identifies the strength of his work and his relationship with his subjects once again.

Of his work with teenagers Bey has said, "My interest in young people has to do with the fact that they are the arbiters of style in the community; their appearance speaks most strongly of how a community of people defines themselves at a particular historical moment."

In 1990, he graduated with a BFA in Photography from Empire State College, and received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1993.

Bey didn't receive his first camera until he was 15, and has stated until that point he wanted to become a musician.

Early musical inspirations included John Coltrane and early photography inspirations were James Van Der Zee and Roy DeCarava.

In his youth, Bey joined the Black Panthers Party and sold their newspaper on street corners.

He does not consider his work to be traditional documentary.

He'll pose subjects, remind them of gestures and sometimes give them accessories.

Over the course of his career, Bey has participated in more than 20 artist residencies, which have allowed him to work directly with the adolescent subjects of his most recent work.

During a residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 1992, Bey began photographing students from a variety of high schools both public and private, in an effort to “reach across lines of presumed differences” among the students and communities.

This new direction in his work guided Bey for the next fifteen years, including two additional residencies at the Addison, an ample number of similar projects across the country, and culminated in a major 2007 exhibition and publication of portraits of teenagers organized by Aperture and entitled Class Pictures.

Alongside each of the photographs in Class Pictures, is a personal statement written by each subject.

"[Bey] manages to capture all the complicated feelings of being young — the angst, the weight of enormous expectations, the hope for the future — with a single look."

In 2012, the Art Institute of Chicago mounted the first complete showing of the "Harlem, USA" photographs since that original exhibition, adding several never before printed photographs to the original group of twenty-five vintage prints.

The complete group of photographs were acquired at that time by the AIC.

‘The Birmingham Project’ (2012) is based on the terrorist-bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama and its victims that occurred on Sunday the 15th of September 1963.

The explosion created a hole that was “large enough to drive a big truck through”.

In 2017, Bey was named a fellow and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is regarded as one of the "most innovative and influential photographers of his generation".

Bey is a professor and Distinguished Artist at Columbia College Chicago.

According to The New York Times, "in the seemingly simple gesture of photographing Black subjects in everyday life, [Bey, an African American,] helped to introduce Blackness in the context of fine Art Long before it was trendy, or even accepted"

‘Night Coming Tenderly, Black’ (2017) is a series of 25 photographs by Bey that reimagines the final part of the journey along the ‘Underground Railroad’.