Dawoud Bey’s work is both a documentation and an excavation. The photographer is preoccupied with history and its effects on our contemporary experience, chronicling the America that resides largely in the shadows and bringing it closer to the center. Often depicting Black subjects, Bey understands that the collective aches we feel today are the remnants of yesterday’s agony, attesting to poet Audre Lorde’s verse: “And there are no new pains.”
On April 17, Bey’s retrospective exhibition “An American Project” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with photographs made over the nearly five decades of the native New Yorker’s career. In Bey’s 35-mm camera images, his Polaroid portraits, and his large-format landscapes, we feel both the passion and contempt that he holds for his complicated country: In a street corner filled with rubbish, Bey sees the poetics of home. In a boy at a bus stop, he sees a Rembrandt painting. Where one sees an ocean, he sees the people who drowned in route to freedom. His visual poetics show the America we want to forget.
Read more about Bey’s work at this Vulture article.