9:13

“History is the thing that I am mostly preoccupied with in my work. How can one reimagine and visualize African American history? Make that history resonate in the contemporary moment.” — Dawoud Bey

Photographer Dawoud Bey is the subject of a full-scale retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – An American Project, open now through May 25, 2020. Expanding on the theme of his acclaimed Birmingham Project, the exhibition “highlights the artist’s commitment over the course of his four-decade career to portraying the black subject and African-American history in a manner that is at once direct and poetic, and immediate and symbolic.”

From SFMoMA:

The exhibition includes his tender and perceptive early portraits of Harlem residents, large-scale color Polaroids, and a series of collaborative word and image portraits of high school students, among others.

More recent projects have taken a historical turn: The Birmingham Project (2012) commemorates the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in a series of deeply affective portrait diptychs. Lately, Bey has turned to landscapes: Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2018) depicts, in deep shades of black and gray, the imagined experience of a fugitive slave moving along the Underground Railroad, marking a formal departure from the artist’s earlier work but considering the same existential questions about race, history, and the possibility of bearing witness through contemporary photography.

In this interview from SFMoMA, Bey discusses several series, sited from Harlem to Birmingham to the Underground Railroad routes of northeastern Ohio, each of which works to make histories visible.