A conversation with photographer Dawoud Bey about Class Pictures and the Emory Project
Posted on | July 23, 2010 | No Comments
Jul 20, 2010
By REBECCA DIMLING COCHRAN
Last winter, the Emory University Visual Arts Gallery presented photographer Dawoud Beys traveling exhibition Class Pictures, which pairs striking portraits of high school students with text they have written. Now Bey, who is based in Chicago, is working on the Emory Project, a special photographic project commissioned by the university that is to be installed on campus this fall and then become part of the schools permanent collection. Guest contributor Rebecca Dimling Cochran caught up with Bey during one of his recent photo shoots in Atlanta.
Rebecca Dimling Cochran: The exhibition Class Pictures, which Atlantans may have seen recently at Emory University, has been traveling the country now for three years and has generated a phenomenal amount of interest. Can you tell us how the project began?
Dawoud Bey: I was invited to do an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago. At that point, when I was invited to do an exhibition, I usually asked if I could do a project with them that would generate some new work, rather than taking work that I had already made and placing it in the museum. So I proposed to do a project with them that brought together students, over a period of eight to 12 weeks, from three very different educational cultures in Chicago: a public school from the south side, a magnet school and the Lab School at the University of Chicago.The larger project was to set up a situation for them to become more critical consumers of visual images. So along with looking at works from the Smart Museums collection, we looked critically at the idea of how the experiences of young people in particular are represented in popular media, and we went to the schools that the students came from to make photographs with them.
Read the rest of the interview at http://www.artscriticatl.com/2010/07/a-conversation-with-photographer-dawoud-bey-about-“class-pictures”-and-the-emory-project/
Comments
Leave a Reply
my other sites
photography groups
sites where I contribute
81 Press
- Taking a Break February 8, 2012Site visitors will probably notice that I haven’t updated here frequently. I am taking a break from my site(s) for at least the summer. I’ve been working in this field for 25 years and I’m burned out on photography and art, the site(s) are in need of major updates/ revamping/ retooling, social media is exhausting, [...] […]
- A New Mission for Aperture? February 8, 2012[…]
- Mambu Badu’s Inaugural Magazine February 8, 2012Danielle was briefly a contributor to this site; I am very excited to hear about her latest venture, the collective and now journal Mambu Badu “that seek to find, expose, and nurture emerging female photographers of African descent.”  Congrats, Danielle! As you may (or may not) know, last fall, I co-founded Mambu Badu, a photography collective […]