3/10/2020 Deep seeing - The African-American experience, as photographed by Dawoud Bey | Prospero | The Economist

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Deep seeing

The African-American experience, as

photographed by Dawoud Bey
A new exhibition assembles images taken by the in uential artist over 40 years

Feb 20th 2020

BY A.C. | SAN FRANCISCO

DAWOUD BEY was 15 when his godmother gave him his rst camera in 1968. The
story might have ended there, had he not ventured to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art a year later, where a controversial photography exhibit called “Harlem on
My Mind” was on display. His intention was to protest against the scarcity of
African-American artists in a show about their own community. But the picket
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was not happening that day, so he went in.

Mr Bey, now 67 and a professor at Columbia College in Chicago, is considered a

luminary of American photography. Struck by the images he saw at the Met, he

began producing work that moved black people in America into the foreground.
Starting with street portraits, his photos have helped ensure that African-
Americans are seen as legitimate subjects; increasingly, he presents them as
witnesses to historical injustice, too. His profoundly moving work has been
widely exhibited and collected; in 2017 he received a MacArthur “genius” grant.

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Now the rst full retrospective of his four-decade career has been co-curated by
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) and the Whitney Museum
of American Art. The show opened in San Francisco and will travel to Atlanta
and New York. Subtitled “An American Project”, it places Mr Bey in the tradition
of American chroniclers such as Walker Evans and Robert Frank—but his aim is
more pointed.

“Part of my agenda with this work is to transform the space of the museum by
bringing this [African-American] community into that space, and make it a
place where they belong,” he told a sell-out audience at SFMoMA. Starting with
his rst, 35mm black-and-white portraits in the 1970s, he said, he wanted to
“reshape the world, one person at a time”.

The 80 works on display ful l this promise. Mr Bey’s subjects, from elegant
Harlem ladies and men in fashionable hats to mothers combing hair and boys
sucking sweets, all share a remarkable, intimate gaze. In a shot from 1972 a
young boy in dark shades lounges in front of the 125th Street cinema in Harlem;
in an image taken in 2012 an older man dressed in impeccable pinstripes
regards the camera from a once-segregated gallery at the Birmingham Museum
of Art. In each photograph the sense of calm and trust is palpable. Mr Bey set out
to create “equitable reciprocal relationships” with those he photographed he
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3/10/2020 Deep seeing - The African-American experience, as photographed by Dawoud Bey | Prospero | The Economist
to create equitable, reciprocal relationships with those he photographed, he
has said, treating them as participants in the making of the work.

Equally striking is the clarity and formal precision of these portraits, which
depict worlds— from marching bands to revival tents to places of work—that are
reminiscent of the German photographer August Sander. Mr Bey pushes his
subjects into the foreground, not as “social subjects, but people with rich
interior lives”.

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A profound shift occurred in his art in the past decade, when he became
interested in photographing not just the present, but the weight of the past and
the passage of time. In the “Harlem Redux” series, which Mr Bey began in 2014,
he returns to the streets he lovingly captured 40 years before. Now they are
shown as almost empty of life, cluttered with the barriers and building sites of
gentri cation. One large colour shot depicts white tourists at a Baptist church,
revealing the absence of a community that once thrived there. This series, he
says, is where he “ gured out how to make photographs where the narrative is
about space, place, and absence”.

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His two most recent projects use that focus on place to address the painful
history of enslavement and discrimination. The rst, “The Birmingham Project”,
is linked to his early experiences. At the age of 11 he saw a photograph of one of
the survivors of the Birmingham church bombing of 1963, in which four girls
were killed. Years later, the image of a girl in a hospital bed with eyes bandaged
came suddenly back to him. “I sat bolt upright in bed,” he says. “I never thought
that was anything but a metaphor, but it is true. I truly sat bolt upright.”

This series exempli es Mr Bey’s thoughtful style. Searching for a way to

illustrate the passage of time, he decided to photograph children the same age as
those who died. Later he pictured adults the age those children would have been
now, had they survived. Though photographed individually, he paired the
gures in diptychs which reveal uncanny resemblances. They sit on church
pews and in the museum in Birmingham from which those very adults were
barred entrance in 1963.

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The last series, “Night Coming Tenderly, Black”, is just as subtly and beautifully
layered. The astonishing nocturnal landscapes are printed in rich blacks and
greys, showing spots thought to have been stations on the Underground Railway
in Ohio, where fugitive slaves sought a path to freedom. For the rst time, Mr
Bey imagines a way to photograph black subjects through their own eyes,
moving “under cover of darkness” through sharp foliage and past white picket
fences. The title derives from a poem by Langston Hughes: “Night coming
tenderly / black like me”. Mr Bey reminds the viewer that night—like his work as
a whole—“is not a hard or dangerous, but tender space”.

“Dawoud Bey: An American Project” continues at the San Francisco Museum of

Modern Art until May 25th. It will then open at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in
June and at the Whitney Museum, New York, in November. Photos are courtesy of
the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Daiter Gallery and Rena Bransten Gallery

Reuse this content The Trust Project

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