Dawoud Bey
Milwaukee Portraits
Dawoud Bey uses multiple images of subjects to explore character and mood in Milwaukee Portraits. The subjects pictured are all students from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD). Each large-scale portrait is made up of six individual 20-inch by 24-inch Polaroid color prints combined to create one composite image measuring 3.5 feet by 5 feet. All of the photographs were made using a 235-pound view camera the Polaroid Corporation built in 1976.
Bey enjoys the medium because of the immediate feedback– pictures arrive in a little over a minute and he can make adjustments during the shoot.
“The camera has become intrinsic to the way that I work and the kind of work that I do,” Bey said.
One of Bey’s objectives is to incorporate diversity into his work. He aims for a cross-section of the community, racially and culturally. His focus on high school and college students relates to his own memories as a teenager.
“It’s a very problematic age,” Bey said. “You’re in the process of becoming who you are going to become and you are not even quite sure how to get there and everyone is making all these demands to you.”
Bey’s young subjects depict youth culture and urban style through clothing, gestures and body language.
“I think the only way to get a sense of the contemporary moment is photographing that particular age group,” Bey said.
Bey chooses his subjects by looking for something intuitive in a person that he thinks will translate into an interesting photograph.
“If they don’t give me something in the moment, it doesn’t really change once you are in front of the camera,” Bey said.
Bey works to reveal something otherwise undetectable in his subjects through his photographs.
“There is some kind of transformation that takes place, which is also a part of what the picture is about,” he said. “There is some significant difference between the person in real life and your experience of the person in the photograph.”
Milwaukee Portraits is part of the art from the original Burke Collection donated to the Midwest Express Center in 1998.
About Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey’s grandmother gave him his first camera, even though he had no interest in the field at the time. Bey believes it sealed his destiny as a photographer. Since the mid-1970s, Bey has worked to expand upon what photography can and should be. Insisting that it is an ethical practice requiring collaboration with his subjects, he creates poignant meditations on visibility, power and race. Bey chronicles communities and histories that have been largely underrepresented or unseen, and his work lends renewed urgency to an enduring conversation about what it means to represent America with a camera. He works in a range of formal and material methodologies. Bey continues his visualization of collective experience and history, using photography as a vehicle to make them resonant in the contemporary moment.
His work has been exhibited worldwide and has become part of permanent collections in numerous museums and other public spaces in the United States and Europe.
Dawoud Bey was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 2017 and is the recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2020, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a major retrospective exhibition of Bey’s work which also traveled to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Bey attended the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1976, holds a BA from Empire State College/State University of New York and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art. He’s taught at several colleges, universities and institutions over the years and is currently a Professor of Art at Columbia College in Chicago.
