Dawoud Bey

Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery.

Dawoud Bey's interest in photography was sparked when, at age fifteen, he attended the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Harlem On My Mind, which included the work of photographer James Van Der Zee. The experience became part of the inspiration for Bey’s first series, Harlem, USA, begun in 1975. Bey is interested in portraiture as a site of psychological and emotional engagement between the photographer and his model. The multiple panels of Bey’s signature style allow him to capture momentary changes in expression, fleeting gestures, and the subtle articulations of personality.

A Girl with School Medals features a young girl from Bey’s old Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, neighborhood and is one of his early street portraits made with Polaroid Type 55 positive/negative film. He had only recently acquired the 4x5 camera that he was using—an antiquated Busch Pressman that he had modified by removing the range finder and using it as a field camera. With the camera and the instant film, Bey began to work in “the studio of the streets,” making these collaborative portraits and giving the subjects the Polaroid print while keeping the negative to later make exhibition prints. When he saw this girl one day, proudly wearing the medals she had been awarded in school, he knew he had to photograph her while she was celebrating her own diligence and achievements in a world that doesn’t always celebrate or encourage Black girls. He knew that her hard work could continue to take her far.

Bey’s photographs have earned him a variety of fellowships, awards, and commissions. His work has been presented in one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Light Work, Syracuse, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, which toured a mid-career retrospective. Bey’s work is also included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of the City of New York; and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, among other institutions. Bey is a professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago.