Black History Month: Dawoud Bey
American photographer Dawoud Bey’s Seeing Deeply is a 40-year retrospective of Bey’s career, including photographs from 1975 through the last several years, published by the University of Texas Press in 2018. Bey has been heralded as inheriting the legacy of Harlem Renaissance artists and leaders like Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava, especially through his commitment to photographing American adolescents in marginalized communities with an empathetic lens.
My interest in young people has to do with the fact that they are the arbiters of style in the community; their appearance speaks most strongly of how a community of people defines themselves at a particular historical moment.
Beyond this is a continuous commitment to put Harlem front and center through street photography, portraits, and large-scale art photography, honoring the community’s physical environment as well as its’ citizens, earning him the MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant in 2017. Bey’s efforts, like artists before him such as DeCarava and James Van Derzee, labor under the time-honored tradition of creating space for the next generation to build upon their achievements. In short, they walk so others can run. We see this impact next week with I Can Make You Feel Good by Tyler Mitchell, an extraordinarily unique depiction of a Black Utopia!
Learn more about Dawoud Bey and his impact.
View more Black History Month posts.
-Emily, Special Collections Writing Intern
