Dawoud Bey

Chicago-based photographer Dawoud Bey began taking photographs as a teenager in Queens, New York, inspired by the work of James VanDerZee exhibited in the seminal show Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969. After viewing the exhibition, Bey began exploring both the medium of photography and the neighborhood of Harlem, where his parents had met and many of his relatives lived. In 1975, he started working on the series Harlem, USA which documented the everyday lives of Harlem residents. Initially exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979, the artist's first solo show, it was reprised by the museum in 2011 as the exhibition Dawoud Bey's Harlem, USA.

In 1992, Bey began working collaboratively, pairing with museums, schools, and communities to create portraits of young people from various backgrounds, conceived by the artist as "a broad dialogue" between the artist, cultural institutions, and the individuals depicted in the photographs. Series such as Class Pictures, which pairs Bey's portraits of high school students with texts authored by his sitters describing themselves and their lives, expand the definition of a portrait, resulting in layered representations of his subjects. In each of his projects, Bey promotes the depth of challenges in modern society and defends the worth of experiences that formulate identity. He renders character poignantly and champions the diversity that defines America.

Bey's work has been exhibited worldwide at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. In 1995, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis held a midcareer survey of his work, Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995 and in 2007, Aperture organized an exhibition of the Class Pictures series that has traveled to institutions throughout the United States, and published a monograph of the same name.