Dawoud Bey - Two American Projects

Corey Keller, Elisabeth Sherman, Torkwase Dyson, Steven Nelson, Imani Perry

Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) is an American photographer best known for his large-scale portraits of underrepresented subjects and his commitment to fostering dialogue about contemporary social and political topics. Bey has also found inspiration in the past, and in two recent series, presented together here for the first time, he addresses African American history explicitly, with renderings both lyrical and immediate. In 2012 Bey created The Birmingham Project, a series of paired portraits memorializing the six children who were victims of the Ku Klux Klan's bombing of Birmingham, Alabama's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a site of mass civil rights meetings, and the violent aftermath. Night Coming Tenderly, Black is a group of large-scale black-and-white landscapes made in 2017 in Ohio that reimagine sites where the Underground Railroad once operated. The book is introduced by an essay...