The Walters Art Museum in conjunction with the Contemporary Museum's exhibition Class Pictures, is featuring photographs by celebrated American artist Dawoud Bey, one of the foremost American artists using the portrait as a sociopolitical act. The exhibit showcases his current artist-in-residency project. The project required the artist to collaborate with 12 teenagers from several Baltimore-area public, private and home schools, focusing on the portrait as a site of psychological and emotional engagement between the photographer and the model.
Since the 1970s, Bey has turned his camera's lens on young people as a way to confront, dissect and recontextualize one of culture's most populized demographics: teenagers. Bey's Portraits Re/Examined exhibit worked with 12 Baltimore-area high school students to select items from the Walters's permanent collection to pair thematically with Bey's own work. Echoing his earlier exhibition, Class Pictures, Bey continued to capture the political and personal angle through the photographs of high school students.
Bey's origins stem from taking candid shots of ordinary people in Harlem. Starting in the 1980s, he expanded his work geographically by visiting black neighborhoods in other cities. He used positive-negative Polaroid film so he could give his subjects their picture immediately after it was taken. As a result, these early images are intimate without being exploitative, saying more about the subjects than the photographer.
Portraits Re/examined is housed in the fourth-floor contemporary art space at the Walters Art Museum on 600 N. Charles St. The photographs double with images from the past, serving to accent the historical similarities between teenagers now and centuries before. A compelling and explorative series, Bey's work is not to be missed. Visit http://www.thewalters.org for more information.
