Dawoud Bey: An American Project
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, through Oct. 3
“Sometimes, the biggest gift an artist can receive is a limitation, an obstacle,” said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. Photography presents multiple obstacles, which Dawoud Bey has been productively surmounting almost since he first picked up a 35-millimeter as a teenager. In a career survey that has just reached his native New York City after two previous stops, Bey’s portraits, mostly of fellow Black Americans, establish why his work is celebrated. They’re “at once so fresh and so assured” that by the time you’ve seen a dozen or more, “your mind is bobbling and humming like a new arrival at a housewarming party.” Bey’s secret has been that he works to share the power that a camera gives a photographer over the subject. “Where other photographers would be quickly in and out,” Bey instead immerses himself in a community, builds trust, and encourages his subjects to participate in how they’re presented.
Born in 1953 in Queens, N.Y., Bey had already taken up photography when a 1969 museum show affirmed the pursuit, said Tausif Noor in The New York Times.
“Harlem on My Mind,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, drew protests because most of the contributing artists were white. But the teenage Bey also saw a chance to carve a place in the world, and just a decade later, he had a museum exhibition of his own: “Harlem, U.S.A.”
One image from that show features a boy in aviator sunglasses posing in front of a movie theater; another captures three elegant women watching a parade. In more recent work, Bey has found a way to make the past visible in photos taken in the present, said Zoe Samudzi in Hyperallergic.com. “The Birmingham Project,” from 2012, is a series of diptychs that commemorate a 1963 church bombing by pairing a child the same age as one of the victims with an elder Birmingham, Ala., resident born the same year as that victim. Viewing the images, “we are confronted by our own mortality,” and I was brought to tears by the love and pride that welled up within me.
Bey tricked time again in the exhibition’s most recent series, said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. In 2017, Bey took daytime photographs of empty locations along the Underground Railroad in Ohio and then printed them to simulate nighttime, encouraging viewers to imagine the barely visible homes, fences, and landscapes as the images that runaway slaves saw when advancing north under the cover of darkness. “With a stroke of allusive magic, Bey conjures Black fugitives moving invisibly through a black terrain to the shores of Lake Erie. There, chunky waves meet the horizon where freedom hovers, swathed in suggestive shadow.”