Dawoud Bey’s photos at Denver Art Museum capture a moment

Lori D. Scott

“Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits,” feels like an unexpected holiday gift from the Denver Art Museum, a sparkling little show that makes for a swell family outing during the celebratory season at hand. If you have friends coming from out of town and want to impress without any stress, this is a welcome option.

Bey built that kind of utility into the work. The 37 photographs on display at DAM are all about community — in this case, the Black communities of Harlem, Washington, D.C., and other Eastern cities.

“A Woman at Fulton Street and Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY,” a 1988 portrait by Dawoud Bey. (Provided by the Denver Art Museum)

Bey walked the streets of these places and captured the faces of the people who lived there. They are ordinary folks who he encountered riding their bikes or hanging out on their front porches. The photographer, working from 1988 through 1991, sought to freeze his subjects on their home turf, acting naturally, connecting however they could with his camera. In that way, the pictures are both deeply human and organically feel-good.

A kid on a bike. A mother and daughter enjoying an afternoon in a park. A woman wearing a fancy hat suitable for Sunday service. There is nothing remotely made up here; it’s just life — though isolated and elevated into art.

Bey’s photos are difficult to categorize, which is precisely the thing that made them original in their day. There were already photographers making images of this terrain when he came along. Some were photojournalists chronicling current events. Others were street photographers snapping real-world scenes on the go. Still others were finding their subjects on the streets and bringing them to studios where they could control lighting and scenery.

Bey did something in the middle of all that. His photos were shot exactly where he encountered his subjects, though they are posed, relaxed, framed in the moment. They do freeze a second in time, though these subjects are willing participants in the documentation of their lives.

What these photos show, and the thing that makes them likable, is a mutual respect between the artist and subject. Bey seems to ask little more from them other than that they stop for a minute and look at his camera. They do, each of them staring directly at his lens.

It is as if he is saying to them. “Your life is just right as it is, deserving to be seen and preserved, not altered for the world’s gaze.”

And if that practice was not proof enough to his subjects, Bey gave them an actual gift for their time. He worked with a camera that used a type of Polaroid film that simultaneously produced an instant print and a negative from which he could make more prints later in a dark room. He handed the instant prints to his subjects when the impromptu photo session was done.

The exhibition is tucked away on DAM's 6th floor, behind a room with formal European pairings. (Provided by the Denver Art Museum)
The exhibition is tucked away on DAM’s 6th floor, behind a room with formal European pairings. (Provided by the Denver Art Museum)

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