An excerpt from my review of Dawoud Bey's newest publication, Street Portraits, for Photomonitor.
Photographed between 1988 and 1991, American educator and artist Dawoud Bey created a series of portraits of black communities, becoming the series Street Portraits— a collection of images of strangers with an intimacy, grace and pride, going that went beyond the casual snapshot, to create visual micro-stories that, although silent, reverberate still years later.
The full review can be read here: https://photomonitor.co.uk/book/street-portraits/
Photobook can be ordered here: https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/street-portraits-br-dawoud-bey
All images © Courtesy the artist and MACK.
'If pre-internet photography has taught us anything, it is that palpability is integral to artistic authenticity; that mastery can make itself known in the most simple of approaches. In the case of New York-native photographer and educator Dawoud Bey, who has spent the majority of his career chronicling the black experience within his works, it is these very factors that make his series ‘Street Portraits’ as compelling as it is: simple, black & white large-format polaroid portraits, collectively serving as a testament to process, to pride and their combined power. The eponymous monograph, published by MACK books, features over seventy portraits created across a three year period between 1988 and 1991 in a range of american cities such as Brooklyn, Harlem and Rochester. What Bey embarked upon was not a simple documentation of people that simply shared his ethnicity, but rather a collaborative examination of what it was to be black, not only photographing subjects but also gifting sitters with a copy of the physical result. Just as Kerry James Marshall or Henry Taylor did with paint, Bey presented a reimagining of blackness, by presenting it within the vein of the everyday; vulnerability, sensitivity and delicacy amongst other things remaining key themes throughout the series, with each challenging the weight of preconception and stereotype that many black people the world over had to, and continue to, navigate and challenge...'.