Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (born 1953, Queens, New York) is an American photographer and educator whose work centers Black life, history, and representation through deeply engaged portraiture and landscape practices. Emerging in the 1970s with a series of street portraits taken in Harlem, Bey has consistently used photography as a means of collaboration, dialogue, and witnessing, often working closely with his subjects to create images that foreground presence, dignity, and agency. Over the course of his career, Bey has developed a range of photographic approaches, from large-format portraiture to immersive landscape and historical projects. His work frequently addresses themes of memory, community, and the afterlives of slavery and racial violence in the United States. In projects such as The Birmingham Project (2012), he commemorates the victims of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing through paired portraits of young people and adults, creating a temporal dialogue across generations. In Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), Bey turns to landscape photography to evoke the experience of the Underground Railroad, using dark, atmospheric imagery to suggest movement, concealment, and the search for freedom. Bey’s practice emphasizes the ethical dimensions of representation, positioning the photographic encounter as a space of mutual respect and shared authorship. His work challenges historical and contemporary visual narratives by centering Black subjects as complex individuals rather than objects of observation. In addition to his artistic practice, Bey has had a significant impact as an educator, mentoring generations of artists through his teaching. His work has been exhibited widely at major institutions internationally and is held in leading museum collections. Bey lives and works in Chicago.