Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey

(b. 1953)

African American photographer Dawoud Bey was born in Jamaica, New York. He started out as a musician, studying piano and drums with established performers and playing in local jazz and funk bands. His godmother gave him his first camera when he was fifteen. He taught himself how to use it by studying photography books and magazines, such as "Popular Photography Annual". In 1969 Bey saw the widely discussed exhibition "Harlem on My Mind" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His personal involvement in social issues spurred his interest in the controversial exhibition, and the experience of seeing gallery after gallery of photographs of blacks was crucial to his development as a photographic artist.

Bey's early work drew on the tradition of documentary, social, and street photography; Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Roy De Carava, were influential. As Bey became interested in the collaborative aspect of a commissioned or posed portrait, his work seemed more akin to the photographs of James VanDerZee or even David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson.

Collaboration has played a central role in some of Bey's most recent work, while a visiting artist at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts (1992 and, through the Addison Gallery of American Art, 1997) and at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (1996). He established relationships with teenagers in the local community through discussions and taking their portraits. As always, Bey sought to create portraits of individuals, in part to counteract the stereotypical images of African Americans that persist in American visual culture.

Bey was educated at Empire State College and Yale University, where he received an M.F.A. in 1993. His first solo exhibition, "Harlem, U.S.A.," was held at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Since then he has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has received many awards and fellowships. He has served on the faculty of several colleges and universities, most recently Columbia College, Chicago, and Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.