Dawoud Bey: Portraiture, Harlem & the Photography of Black American Life

A Young Woman Waiting for the Bus, Syracuse (1985) | Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey has spent more than five decades asking deceptively simple questions about photography. Who gets pictured? Who gets to control the way they are seen? What happens when a camera treats an ordinary person with the same seriousness traditionally reserved for celebrities, politicians, and historical figures? And can a photograph make a history visible even when the people who lived that history are no longer there to be photographed?

Those questions have carried Bey from the streets of Harlem to high-school classrooms, Birmingham churches, the changing neighborhoods of New York, Louisiana plantation landscapes, the Underground Railroad routes of Ohio, and the former slave-trading landscape of Richmond, Virginia. Along the way, he has continually changed cameras, formats, and methods while maintaining an unusually consistent purpose: using photography to give Black people, communities, and histories a commanding presence within American visual culture.

Born David Edward Smikle in Jamaica, Queens, New York, on November 25, 1953, Bey began photographing as a teenager and changed his name to Dawoud Bey in the early 1970s. His earliest important work emerged from Harlem in the mid-1970s, but his career eventually expanded far beyond street photography. Large-format portraits, monumental Polaroids, collaborative portraits of teenagers, historical landscapes, and film installations all became part of a practice built around visibility, memory, dignity, and the responsibilities that come with pointing a camera at another person.

📷 A Camera at Fifteen

Bey received his first camera when he was fifteen years old. The following year, an experience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art helped change the direction of his life.

In 1969, the Met presented Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968. The exhibition became highly controversial, in part because a show supposedly devoted to Harlem largely excluded the work of Black artists and photographers from the neighborhood itself. Protests surrounded the exhibition, and the controversy helped draw the teenage Bey to the museum.

What he encountered there was complicated. The exhibition’s approach was deeply flawed, but seeing photographs of ordinary Black people displayed on the walls of one of the country’s most prestigious museums had an enormous impact on him. It demonstrated that everyday Black life could become the subject of serious cultural attention and that photography could preserve a community’s collective memory.

A few years later, Bey decided to begin making his own pictures of Harlem.

🏙️ Harlem, U.S.A.

In 1975, at the age of twenty-two, Bey began photographing Harlem with a handheld 35mm camera. Although he had grown up in Queens, Harlem was deeply connected to his family history. His parents had met there, relatives still lived in the neighborhood, and Bey had visited throughout his childhood.

The project eventually became ** Harlem, U.S.A. **, one of the defining bodies of work of his early career.

Rather than searching for dramatic scenes of poverty, crime, or urban crisis, Bey photographed ordinary people moving through ordinary days. Men stood outside storefronts. Women attended parades. Children posed together. People waited, talked, walked, shopped, and watched the neighborhood around them.

That choice mattered.

During the 1970s, mainstream representations of predominantly Black urban neighborhoods frequently emphasized disorder and decline. Bey was not denying the economic and political difficulties affecting Harlem. He simply refused to allow those difficulties to become the only story.

His Harlem residents possess individual personalities rather than functioning as evidence for a social argument.

👁️ Looking With Rather Than Looking At

Bey’s early work already contained an idea that would become fundamental to his entire career: photography is a relationship.

A photographer does not merely take an image.

Someone is being photographed.

That person is looking back.

Bey became increasingly attentive to what happens between photographer and subject during the brief period when an image is being made. Even his street photographs often feel collaborative because people frequently acknowledge the camera rather than appearing as unsuspecting objects of observation.

That distinction eventually became central to his mature portraiture.

Bey wanted his subjects to occupy the photograph as active participants in their own representation.

They could stand however they wished.

They could look directly into the lens.

They could present themselves rather than simply being captured.

🖼️ The Studio Museum in Harlem

Harlem, U.S.A. received an important exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979, when Bey was only twenty-six.

The location could hardly have been more appropriate.

The pictures had been made within the community, and Bey was committed to having them return to that community rather than allowing the photographs to circulate only within distant museums and galleries.

This idea of access became another recurring feature of his career. Bey has repeatedly argued that museums and cultural institutions should develop meaningful relationships with the communities surrounding them.

Photography could help create those relationships.

An exhibition did not have to be the final stage of an artist’s work. It could become part of a larger conversation involving the people represented, the museum displaying them, and the audiences encountering them.

🚶 From Candid Street Photography to the Street Portrait

During the 1980s, Bey began changing the way he photographed strangers.

The lightweight 35mm camera that had allowed him to move easily through Harlem gave way to a much larger 4 × 5-inch view camera mounted on a tripod.

The change transformed the entire photographic encounter.

A photographer cannot casually disappear into a crowd while standing beside a large camera and tripod.

The subject knows something is happening.

The process slows down.

Bey had to approach people, introduce himself, explain what he wanted to do, position the camera, arrange the composition, and make the exposure.

Photography became less about catching a fleeting moment and more about creating one together.

🎞️ The Polaroid Street Portraits

Bey’s Street Portraits, begun in the late 1980s, demonstrate how productive that slower process became.

He used Polaroid Type 55 film, which created both a positive print and a negative. The process allowed him to give the small instant photograph directly to the person he had photographed while retaining the negative from which he could make a larger print.

The exchange was important.

The person who had given Bey time, attention, and access received something in return.

The resulting photographs are formal but remarkably relaxed. People stand on sidewalks, lean against bicycles, sit beside companions, or simply meet the camera’s gaze.

They are clearly posing.

Yet they do not appear trapped inside somebody else’s idea of how they should look.

The portrait becomes a negotiated space.

🧍 The Power of Looking Back

Direct eye contact plays an important role in many of Bey’s portraits.

A subject who looks straight into the lens also looks directly at the eventual viewer.

That gaze changes the power relationship of photography.

The viewer is no longer free to inspect another person without consequence.

The person looks back.

In works such as A Boy Eating a Foxy Pop, Brooklyn, A Young Man Resting on an Exercise Bike, and A Couple in Prospect Park, Bey gives his subjects enough physical and psychological space to establish their own presence.

The backgrounds matter.

Clothing matters.

Gesture matters.

But the people remain more important than the environment surrounding them.

🎨 The 20 × 24 Polaroid

Bey continued moving toward larger and more deliberate photographic forms.

During the 1990s, he began working with the enormous 20 × 24-inch Polaroid camera, a rare piece of equipment capable of producing large instant color photographs.

The camera fundamentally altered portraiture.

It was far too large to behave invisibly.

Subjects had to participate knowingly in the process, and the resulting photographs possessed a physical scale usually associated with painting.

Bey used the format to create portraits that could confront viewers almost at life size.

Faces became landscapes.

Small changes in expression became visually significant.

The photograph no longer felt like a little window onto another person.

The subject occupied the museum wall.

🧩 Breaking Apart the Portrait

Bey also experimented with multi-panel portraits in which a person’s body or face was divided across several photographs.

Instead of producing a single unified image, he photographed sections separately and assembled them together.

The result complicates the traditional assumption that a photograph captures one complete instant.

Different parts of the body may come from slightly different moments.

The subject remains recognizable, but time has entered the portrait.

That fragmentation also encourages the viewer to look more carefully. Rather than absorbing the person’s face immediately, the eye moves between panels, assembling the portrait mentally.

Bey found another way to slow down looking.

🧑‍🎓 Teenagers Become Central Subjects

During a 1992 residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Bey began photographing high-school students.

The experience opened an important new direction in his work.

Teenagers occupy an unusually unstable social position. They are no longer children but have not yet become adults, and representations of teenagers frequently reduce them to stereotypes involving clothing, behavior, class, race, or youth culture.

Bey approached them differently.

He treated adolescence as a period in which identity is actively being formed rather than as a category adults already understand.

That idea eventually became the foundation for ** Class Pictures **.

🏫 Class Pictures

Between 2002 and 2006, Bey worked with students at high schools around the United States for his Class Pictures project.

The photographs are large-scale color portraits, but Bey added another collaborative element.

The students wrote statements about themselves.

Their words accompanied their photographs.

This meant that Bey did not have exclusive control over the story being told. The image provided one form of representation while the student’s writing provided another.

A teenager might discuss family, insecurity, ambition, friendship, identity, or a future that viewers could never deduce simply by studying clothing and facial expression.

The combination challenged the assumption that photographs allow us to know someone completely.

Looking is not the same as understanding.

✍️ Giving Subjects Their Own Words

The written component of Class Pictures is especially important because portrait photography inevitably encourages interpretation.

Viewers look at a face and begin inventing a personality.

We guess.

We judge.

We build stories from visual clues.

Bey complicated that process by letting his subjects speak alongside their portraits.

The teenager could contradict the viewer’s assumptions.

Someone who appears confident might describe uncertainty.

Someone who appears quiet might reveal enormous ambition.

Image and language create a conversation.

Neither completely explains the other.

🎓 The Artist as Educator

Education has been central to Bey’s career alongside his studio practice.

He began teaching photography relatively early and became associated with several institutions before joining Columbia College Chicago in 1998. His work as a professor and mentor extended the collaborative philosophy visible in his photographs.

Bey has repeatedly emphasized that cultural institutions should not simply display communities from a distance.

They should create opportunities for those communities to participate.

Teaching, residencies, workshops, conversations, and exhibitions therefore become interconnected parts of his practice.

The photograph is important.

So is the relationship that produces it.

🤝 Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems

Another important relationship in Bey’s artistic life has been his long friendship with photographer and artist Carrie Mae Weems.

The two met in Harlem in the 1970s when they were both young photographers beginning to establish their artistic practices.

Their work developed differently, but both remained deeply concerned with representation, race, identity, power, history, and the visibility of Black life.

Bey became particularly associated with portraiture and community engagement, while Weems frequently incorporated staged imagery, narrative, performance, and text.

Their decades-long artistic conversation was eventually explored in the traveling exhibition Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue.

The pairing revealed how artists can share fundamental questions without producing similar answers.

🏙️ Returning to Harlem

Nearly four decades after Harlem, U.S.A., Bey returned to the neighborhood for another major project.

The Harlem he encountered was dramatically different.

Gentrification had changed the built environment.

Businesses disappeared.

Property values increased.

New residents arrived.

Longtime residents faced displacement.

Rather than simply repeating his earlier street portraits, Bey changed his subject.

This time he photographed the neighborhood itself.

The resulting series became ** Harlem Redux **.

🏗️ Harlem Redux

Created between 2014 and 2017, Harlem Redux uses large-format color photography to examine a neighborhood undergoing substantial transformation.

The absence of people in many of the photographs is striking.

Storefronts, construction sites, buildings, street corners, and vacant spaces become evidence of change.

The shift from people to architecture is significant.

In the 1970s, Harlem’s residents had been the center of Bey’s pictures.

Decades later, Bey photographed the physical environment partly because changes to that environment were affecting who could remain there.

The neighborhood itself had become the portrait.

⛪ The Birmingham Project

One of Bey’s most emotionally powerful bodies of work began with a photograph he had encountered as a child.

On September 15, 1963, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. Later that same day, two Black boys, Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware, were killed in separate acts of racial violence.

A young Dawoud Bey saw a photograph of bombing survivor Sarah Jean Collins recovering in a hospital.

He never forgot it.

Decades later, he began traveling repeatedly to Birmingham, learning about the city and developing relationships within the community.

In 2012, he created ** The Birmingham Project **.

👥 Photographing Absence Through Presence

Bey faced an unusual problem with The Birmingham Project.

How do you make portraits of people who died fifty years earlier?

His solution was both simple and devastating.

He photographed contemporary Birmingham residents in pairs.

One member of each pair was the age of one of the children killed in 1963.

The other was the age that child would have been approximately fifty years later.

The portraits therefore create an imagined bridge between a life interrupted and the adulthood that never occurred.

A child appears beside an older adult.

The viewer understands the years separating them.

That invisible span of time becomes the subject.

🕯️ What Might Have Been

The brilliance of The Birmingham Project lies partly in its refusal to represent the victims only through death.

Historical accounts understandably preserve the ages at which they died.

Bey asks us to think about all the ages they never reached.

Thirty.

Forty.

Fifty.

Sixty.

The older adults in the diptychs are not intended as literal predictions of what the murdered children would have looked like.

Instead, they represent duration.

The portraits transform historical loss from a single terrible day into decades of missing possibility.

History is not only what happened.

It is also what was prevented from happening.

🌑 Turning Away From Faces

After decades devoted primarily to people, Bey began making photographs in which no person appeared at all.

The shift did not mean that people had disappeared from his concerns.

Quite the opposite.

He had begun asking whether landscape itself could carry Black history.

Could trees remember?

Could roads suggest fear?

Could a farmhouse become threatening?

Could darkness make viewers imagine the experience of people who had once moved through that landscape under extraordinary danger?

Those questions led to ** Night Coming Tenderly, Black **.

🌙 Night Coming Tenderly, Black

Created in 2017, Night Coming Tenderly, Black consists of dark black-and-white landscapes photographed along routes associated with the Underground Railroad in northeastern Ohio.

The title comes from Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Variations,” linking Bey’s landscapes with a long tradition of Black literature and artistic expression.

The photographs are intentionally difficult to see.

Trees dissolve into blackness.

Houses barely emerge from shadow.

Roads disappear.

Lake Erie occupies an uncertain horizon.

Instead of photographing historical reenactments, Bey asks viewers to imagine moving through the landscape under cover of darkness.

The absence of figures allows the viewer’s imagination to enter the space.

🌲 Darkness as Protection

Darkness operates differently in Night Coming Tenderly, Black than it does in many Western visual traditions.

Night often signifies danger.

For people escaping slavery, darkness could also provide protection.

It concealed movement.

It offered temporary cover.

It helped make escape possible.

Bey therefore treats darkness not simply as something threatening but as something potentially protective.

That reversal gives the photographs their extraordinary emotional complexity.

The landscape may feel frightening.

It may also represent movement toward freedom.

📷 Roy DeCarava’s Influence

Bey’s dark tonal range also connects his work with Roy DeCarava, one of the photographers who demonstrated how expressive deep shadow could become.

DeCarava photographed Harlem, jazz musicians, families, streets, and interiors using extraordinary gradations of black and gray.

Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black operates within a very different historical project, but the ability to make darkness visually and emotionally meaningful creates an important connection between the two photographers.

Neither treats shadow as missing information.

Darkness contains information.

The eye has to work to find it.

🌾 In This Here Place

Bey continued exploring historical landscape with ** In This Here Place **, photographed in Louisiana.

The series focuses on landscapes associated with former plantations.

Once again, Bey does not stage scenes of enslaved people working.

The contemporary landscape carries the history.

Trees, paths, fields, waterways, fences, and surviving structures occupy the photographs.

The calmness can be unsettling because these places may initially appear beautiful.

Bey asks viewers to hold that beauty alongside knowledge of what happened there.

Landscape is never merely scenery once history becomes visible within it.

🛤️ Stony the Road

Bey extended this investigation with ** Stony the Road **, a series made along the Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia.

Richmond was one of the most important centers of the domestic slave trade in the United States. Enslaved people were forcibly marched through the landscape toward sites where human beings were confined and sold.

Bey photographed the trail in black and white.

As with his previous historical landscapes, there are no reenacted figures.

The land becomes the witness.

Paths disappear around bends.

Trees create barriers.

The viewer has to imagine movement through spaces that appear quiet in the present but contain violent histories.

🎥 Photography Expands Into Film

Bey’s recent historical projects have also incorporated moving images.

Films and photographic sequences allow him to explore duration differently from a single still image. A photograph freezes time, while film requires viewers to remain within time as a landscape gradually unfolds.

This expanded practice culminated in ** Dawoud Bey: Elegy **, an exhibition bringing together Night Coming Tenderly, Black, In This Here Place, and Stony the Road alongside film installations.

Seen together, the projects create a geographical movement through Black American history.

Virginia evokes the forced movement of enslaved Africans into the domestic slave trade.

Louisiana evokes plantation labor.

Ohio evokes the dangerous movement toward freedom.

Landscape becomes historical narrative.

🏛️ Dawoud Bey: An American Project

Bey’s extraordinary range was surveyed in the major retrospective ** Dawoud Bey: An American Project **, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The exhibition brought together roughly four and a half decades of work, beginning with Harlem, U.S.A. and continuing through his Street Portraits, monumental Polaroids, Class Pictures, The Birmingham Project, Harlem Redux, and Night Coming Tenderly, Black.

Seen together, the changes are striking.

Small black-and-white street photographs become enormous color portraits.

Portraits become landscapes.

Spontaneous encounters become projects developed through years of historical research.

Yet the central concern remains surprisingly consistent.

Bey is asking who belongs inside the American picture.

🏆 The MacArthur Fellowship

In 2017, Bey was named a MacArthur Fellow, one of the most significant recognitions of his career.

The MacArthur Foundation emphasized both his portraiture and his efforts to create meaningful relationships between cultural institutions and the communities they serve.

The recognition was appropriate because Bey’s work has never been confined to the production of beautiful photographic objects.

He is equally interested in what those photographs do once they enter the world.

Who sees them?

Where are they shown?

Whose histories do museums preserve?

Who feels welcome inside those institutions?

Photography, in Bey’s practice, has social consequences.

🎞️ Changing Cameras to Change Relationships

One of the most fascinating aspects of Bey’s career is how deliberately he changes photographic technologies.

The 35mm camera allowed speed and mobility in Harlem.

The 4 × 5 camera slowed the street encounter and created greater collaboration.

Polaroid technology allowed him to give an image back to the sitter immediately.

The giant 20 × 24 Polaroid created monumental physical presence.

Large-format color photography transformed neighborhood architecture into carefully considered landscape.

Darkroom printing allowed the historical landscapes of Night Coming Tenderly, Black to sink into layers of darkness.

Technology is never merely technical for Bey.

Each camera changes the relationship between photographer, subject, time, and viewer.

👀 Photography Takes Time

Bey’s mature work increasingly asks viewers to slow down.

The early Harlem photographs can appear immediate, but even there close observation reveals complex relationships between people, clothing, storefronts, gestures, and streets.

The large portraits require time because faces at that scale cannot be absorbed casually.

The historical landscapes may require even more patience.

At first, a photograph may appear almost completely dark.

Then trees emerge.

A fence appears.

A building becomes visible.

A road develops.

The viewer’s eyes gradually enter the picture.

That process mirrors Bey’s broader approach to history.

You do not understand it at a glance.

You have to remain with it.

🖤 Black Life as an American Subject

One of the great through lines of Bey’s career is his insistence that Black life is not a specialized category adjacent to American photography.

It is American photography.

Harlem residents are American subjects.

Teenagers in Chicago and New York are American subjects.

The Birmingham church bombing is American history.

Slavery is American history.

The Underground Railroad is American history.

Gentrification in Harlem is an American story.

Bey’s major retrospective was called An American Project precisely because his work belongs inside the broader tradition through which photographers have attempted to describe the United States.

The difference is that Bey asks viewers to recognize people and histories that earlier versions of that tradition too frequently placed outside the frame.

📚 Memory Without Illustration

Bey’s historical photographs are particularly powerful because he avoids the temptation to illustrate the past literally.

There are no actors pretending to escape slavery in Night Coming Tenderly, Black.

There are no staged plantation scenes in In This Here Place.

The children murdered in Birmingham are not impersonated.

Instead, Bey creates structures that allow viewers to think about absence.

A dark path suggests people who once traveled through similar landscapes.

An older adult beside a child suggests decades of life that were taken away.

A plantation field becomes impossible to view innocently once its history is understood.

Bey leaves enough space for memory to remain complicated.

✨ Dawoud Bey & the Responsibility of Seeing

Dawoud Bey began with a camera and the people of Harlem.

More than fifty years later, the scope of his work has expanded enormously, but the basic ethical question remains.

What does it mean to see another person seriously?

His answer has never been simply to photograph more people.

It has been to reconsider the entire photographic relationship.

He slows the encounter.

He collaborates.

He allows subjects to speak.

He brings photographs back into communities.

He asks museums to reconsider whom they serve.

And when history gives him no living person to photograph, he turns toward landscapes and asks what absence itself might look like.

Bey’s work demonstrates that representation is never neutral. Every photograph includes something and excludes something else. Every image gives attention to one subject while countless others remain unseen.

For more than half a century, Dawoud Bey has used that reality deliberately.

A person stands before the camera.

A landscape waits in darkness.

A history becomes visible.

And the viewer is asked not merely to look, but to recognize what seeing carries with it.