Existing comment:
Dawoud Bey
The Birmingham Project
In 2005, American photographer Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) visited Birmingham, Alabama, to explore the possibility of making work that would commemorate the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. On that day, four girls lost their lives in the bombing and two boys were killed in related violence. Bey spent the next seven years meeting a wide range of people in the community, and in 2012 he began to make a series of paired portraits. To give physical presence to the murdered children, Bey included one photograph of a young person the same age as one of the victims in 1963, and another of an adult fifty years older, the child's age had she or he survived. Representing these unwitting icons of the civil rights movement with ordinary people, the diptychs connect generations and make the children "real, tangible," as Bey explained, "These girls are an abstraction to people -- the mythic four girls -- we lose sight of their humanity."
This exhibition commemorates the fifty-fifth anniversary of the tragedy. Pushing the boundaries of portraiture, Bey visualizes loss and memory in photography and video. In doing so, he addresses ongoing national issues of racism, violence against African Americans, and terrorism in places of worship. |