Dawoud Bey, Street Portraits, 1998-1991

Dawoud Bey is probably one of my favorite current working photographers, I had the opportunity to meet him while living in Chicago last year working on a project similar to his street portrait series and so I suppose I'm biased to an extent, yet I feel he's an answer for keeping a specific photographic culture alive, that being the street portrait. The portraits existence as a self-assertion of presence is very important as the act of taking someone's portrait is one of privilege. Photography can be a democratic medium though the power that the photograph as documentation holds in our world can just as easily be used to erase the marginalized or propagate false narratives. Dawoud Bey's primary interest in his photographic practice lies in imaging the lived black experience without alienating his subjects, that's very important to consider. As more often than not the marginalized people of a given community are not represented by a familiar face, so you have to bargain, and Bey's work illustrates the breakdown of bargaining between subject and artist as he represents people entirely as they are. There's a unity in his portraits composition and distance from the subject. Street portraits as an aspect of photography is somewhat of a declining form which is disappointing as it's such a uniting force of stimulating strangers' ability to engage with each other. When conducting my own street portrait series, I recognized it was not a passive act the need for trust to be formed in such a short span of time, as long as it takes for me to press the shutter button my subject allowed me to capture a facet of their identity, and there's a lot of responsibility in that act especially in the difference between creating interesting images and empowering images and we often may treat this as opposing creative choices yet Bey's work straddles a divide in making work that's not only conceptually interesting but respects his subjects as people worth noticing and not a caricature to be gawked at. (Week 5)