Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (born November 25, 1953, Jamaica, Queens, New York, U.S.) is an American photographer, writer, and educator known for his sensitive large-scale portraits and candid street photographs of everyday Black American life. His later work probes the psychic traces left on present-day landscapes by the slave trade and the liberatory travels of formerly enslaved people through the “stations” of the Underground Railroad.

Early life

Bey was born David Edward Smikle to Kenneth Smikle, an engineer, and Mary Smikle, a homemaker. He was raised in Jamaica, Queens, New York, with his brother, Kenneth Smikle, Jr., and two sisters, Sandra Smikle and Georgianna Smikle. According to an account the artist gave The New York Times in 2020, he had dabbled in photography from an early age, taking photographs of his classmates with a Kodak Instamatic when he was 11 years old. He later inherited a 35-mm camera from his godfather and learned to develop film and print photographs from Levey J. Smith, who owned a local photography studio.

In 1969, when Smikle was a teenager, he visited the exhibition “ ‘Harlem on My Mind’: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The show had sparked protests for its exclusion of work by African American artists who lived in the Harlem district of New York City, such as Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, and Jacob Lawrence. Instead, it had been conceived as a documentary display of large-scale photographs, newspaper clippings, and recordings of jazz and of street traffic. The exhibition was largely panned by critics, but it drew large crowds. Indeed, Smikle, who expected to find only European painting and sculptures in a museum, was surprised to see museumgoers looking at photographs of ordinary African Americans. Moreover, he was galvanized by the realization that one did not have to passively take in what the museum offered; one could, in his words, “speak back to the museum.”

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Harlem, U.S.A. and Harlem Redux

Smikle went on to study at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan between 1976 and 1978. About this time, he was inspired by contemporary artists who were taking African names to change his name from David Smikle to Dawoud Bey (“Dawoud” is Arabic for David, and “Bey” is in honor of jazz percussionist James Hawthorne Bey). In 1979 Bey had his first solo show, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which featured photographs from his series Harlem, U.S.A. (1975–79). The intimate street photographs showcase Harlem residents’ lives in their vitality and variety. Elegantly dressed women lean against police barriers on a parade route (e.g., Three Women at a Parade, Harlem, NY [1978] and Two Women at a Parade [1978]); barbers stand inside their small smart shops, whose mirrors and windows have been polished to a shine (e.g., Deas McNeil, the Barber [1976] and A Barber in His Barbershop [1976]); and members of a regimental marching band proudly hold their instruments (e.g., A Trombonist from the 369th Armory Marching Band, Harlem, NY [1977] and Men from the 369th Regiment Marching Band, Harlem, NY [1977]). Bey later described his street portraits as “formal but casual,” giving his subjects the chance to “assert themselves and their presence in the world, with their gaze meeting the viewer’s on an equal footing.”

Bey received widespread attention for the project and continued taking street photographs in subsequent years. He returned to the subject of Harlem several decades later, in the Harlem Redux series (2014–17). The project reveals the profound effects wrought by gentrification in the area. The distant, impersonal color photographs showing construction sites, vendors’ stalls, and high-end cafés and restaurants, only incidentally populated by human subjects, contrast pointedly with the collective portrait of a community found in Harlem, U.S.A.

The Chicago Project and Class Pictures

In the late 1980s Bey returned to school. He received a B.F.A. degree in 1990 from Empire State College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and an M.F.A. degree in 1993 from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Although he had established an early reputation as a street photographer, about this time his practice shifted to incorporate studio photography created using Polaroid film and a tripod-mounted camera. He has produced a number of large-scale portraits of his family, friends, and social circle. In 1998 Bey moved to Chicago with his then wife, painter Candida Alvarez, and their son, Ramon Alvarez-Smikle, to take up a position at Columbia College, where he continues to teach. In 2002 he returned to a 1992 project of taking portraits of high-school students, which resulted in The Chicago Project (2003). The series depicts local students accompanied by short statements written by the teenagers, who offer frank disclosures about their lives, aspirations, and experiences of raced, classed, and gendered identity. The subjects thereby actively participate in their own portrayal rather than serving as passive artist’s models. Bey subsequently went beyond that series to include photographs of students from all over the country, showing a breadth of economic, social, and ethnic backgrounds in Class Pictures (2002–06).

The Birmingham Project

Bey has also deployed his portrait practice to address the United States’ history of racial prejudice. In The Birmingham Project (2013), the artist commemorated the four girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing (September 15, 1963) in Birmingham, Alabama, orchestrated by associates of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as two teenage boys murdered in unrelated racially motivated incidents on the same day. The series consists primarily of diptychs, each pairing an image of a Birmingham resident who is the same age as one of the victims at the time of the bombing with an image of a resident who is the age the victim would have been in the present, had he or she survived the attacks. The loss of life is felt in the years between the two portraits, an empty space suggesting the victim’s absence.

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Night Coming Tenderly, Black, In This Here Place, and Stony the Road

Bey’s later work has likewise been defined by the spectral presence of historical individuals and events rendered invisible by the passage of time. His turn toward landscape photography investigating the past commenced with the 2017 series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, which shows sites found in the vicinity of a former Underground Railroad route in Ohio. Another series, In This Here Place (2019), documents former plantations in Louisiana, while the Stony the Road series (2023) follows the path forcibly traveled by newly arrived enslaved people in Richmond, Virginia. The shadowy black-and-white landscapes, in which a human point of view is felt rather than seen, imply the continued immediacy of the histories they embody.

Awards and exhibitions

Bey’s photography career has been recognized through numerous honors, including a 2017 MacArthur fellowship. His work has been shown in many solo exhibitions, including a major traveling retrospective, “Dawoud Bey: An American Project” (2020–22) organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bey’s photographs are in the collections of such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.