BOMB Magazine | An Oral History with Dawoud Bey by An-My Lê (2024)

Dawoud Bey is an artist and educator whose work on Black quotidian subjects situates him within a legacy and tradition of contemporary Black photographers in the United States. Bey, interviewed by his friend and peer An-My Lê, describes how foundational experiences with community institutions, including the Store Front Museum in Queens, New York, helped shape his artistic practice. Originating his art practice as a musician and supported by his instructors in the Jazzmobile Workshops and his parents, Bey came to develop an artistic practice in both music and photography that highlighted and expanded his sense of community. After making the transition to photography in the 1970s, Bey took inspiration from the seemingly ordinary depictions of everyday folk in the photography of Roy DeCarava, Irving Penn, and Mike Disfarmer. In this oral history, Lê explores Bey’s roles as mentor, educator, advocate, and collaborator. Through their candid conversation, we are permitted to witness Bey’s artistic journey through his retelling of the earliest, ordinary experiences of his youth and the way they motivate his extraordinary practice of seeing Blackness.

—Janée A. Moses, Director of the Oral History Project

Session 1 (March 25, 2024)

An-My LêDawoud, I met you at the Yale School of Art in 1991, when we started the master’s program together. It was a life-changing experience for me, but I think it was perhaps somewhat less life-changing for you.

Dawoud BeyWe came to Yale with very different sets of life and professional experiences, and yet we both ended up there at the same time. At that point in my life, grad school was still a defining moment. It was certainly a major decision to go back to school after earning my Bachelor’s in Fine Arts at Empire State College in 1990, a year earlier. I had actually started my undergrad at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) back in 1976, but I left after two years.

ALNow, thirty years later, we’re still talking. I hate to use the word “journey,” but it’s been quite a journey, and I’m really excited to be having this conversation with you. You’re right about us having very different life experiences. When we met, I didn’t know much about the art world but, of course, I’d heard so much about the significance of New York City to the art world, especially during the ’70s. I was so eager to get to know you because you grew up in Queens and seemed to already have so much experience. I’ve since learned the importance of building communities in your work. I think it comes from your origin story, from coming of age in New York City during the ’70s. Can you talk about what Queens and New York City were like then? What does that community mean to you, and how has it changed? How do you maintain your connection to your origin story?

DBI made the decision to become an artist and a photographer in the mid-seventies, and then I began to find a community of people like myself. One thing that I was initially aware of was the seemingly isolating experience of being an artist. I didn’t grow up with people who were artists. I didn’t grow up with parents who went to museums. I didn’t grow up in the milieu that I was becoming interested in. What I did grow up in was music. This is the other piece of my story. When I first became interested in photography and art, I had already been active as a young musician. And music certainly is not something that you can make on your own. You have to have a community in order to make music.

ALRight.

DBSo, I had a sense, from having been a musician, that the work that one makes as an artist actually comes out of a conversation with others and that community has the capacity to grow as you go deeper into your practice. As a young drummer, I ended up having the good fortune to study with some very good teachers, including the late Milford Graves. He’s the father of free jazz drumming. Milford and I were from the same community in Jamaica, Queens. He lived in my neighborhood.

ALWow.

DBHe was teaching classes at a place called the Store Front Museum in Jamaica, Queens, which was a Black cultural center and educational space founded by artist Tom Lloyd. I started taking classes with him and then from there, I met other musicians who were studying and playing with him. Then, along with a friend who was also Milford’s student, I started taking classes at the Jazzmobile’s Saturday Jazz Workshops in Harlem, which took over public school IS 201. Each classroom had an individual music class taught by a very well-known jazz musician. I ended up studying with Tootie Heath. Later, when I became more proficient, he sent me to study with Freddie Waits in the advanced drumming class. And of course, being in that climate of young musicians every Saturday, I was also building community. Later, after I moved to my neighborhood in Hollis, Queens, there were about five different bands on my block alone. There were two directly across the street from me, two on the corner, and one around the corner. Queens was a hotbed of activity for young musicians. And you know, I’ve considered that this was probably related to the fact that we were growing up in houses, not apartments. In houses, as opposed to apartments, we all had basem*nts or attics or backyards and garages—

AL What an extraordinary mom!

DB —and an electric keyboard, two horns, and percussion in the living room! So, I had this real sense of community, and I was performing with different bands, playing in Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn. We even got as far as playing Newport Jazz Festival at Carnegie Recital Hall.

AL These experiences are so amazing. You learned the foundational things that are so important to artists. While you weren’t on the artist track, where you become an artist because that’s what your parents do, you still learned the foundational practice of figuring out what you like and studying with great teachers. You figured out where to practice and how to meet like-minded people.

DB I know!

AL These lessons are so resourceful and idiosyncratic which, I think, is much more dynamic and original than coming from a dynasty of artist parents.

DB Yeah. I garnered respect for the history and rigor of art practice from my drum teachers.The sense that what you’re doing has a history and the need to appreciate it to participate in your art at a higher level. You need to know that history.

AL And eventually break away from it.

DBOh, exactly. When I became interested in photography, all of these lessons in music practice became my model. The Jazzmobile Workshop was one of the places where I initially met my music community; and later, in the mid-seventies, the Studio Museum in Harlem (SMH) was where I met my art community. My trajectory also points to the huge importance of those institutions in forming communities for many artists of my generation. There was a whole network of what were then called “alternative spaces.” There was the Studio Museum, the Cinque Gallery, the Kitchen, Exit Art, and, if you were interested in photography, the Fourth Street Photo Gallery and the Midtown Y Photography Gallery. In each of these alternative spaces, you could meet other informed and engaged people like yourself, people who would become both personal community and, clearly, professional community too. Another important community was my family and friends. A friend of mine had a brother who became interested in photography for maybe a week, and he’d gone out and bought an enlarger, a small film-developing tank, a timer, a big red darkroom light bulb, and some developing trays.

And then he just shoved it all in a closet and left home. When I became interested in photography, my friend showed up at my house with this small darkroom kit. And just like when my band played in our living room, my mother allowed me after hours to set up a darkroom in her kitchen!

ALSo, she had to clean up after dinner so you could pull out your trays.

DBExactly. All she said was “Make sure you clean up before I come down in the morning and I don’t want to smell anything.” So, I would work into the night and through the early morning hours. Then I would stop and spray some Glade air freshener, knock everything down, and put everything under the sink before my mom came down. While my parents didn’t take me and my brother to museums growing up, they were fully supportive of our creative pursuits, even though, especially when I became interested in photography, they had no idea how we were going to turn these into something practical. All they knew was you could be a wedding photographer.

ALRight.

DBTo my parents, my options included photographing babies or having a portrait studio. They could not understand the context in which I was looking at photography but they supported it.

ALI think the earliest works of photography that impressed you were done in the studio, right? By photographers like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn?

DBYes, and Mike Disfarmer. I saw work by these photographers in the ’70s. Early in my career, I was making photographs in the street with a small 35mm camera, and yet pictures by those photographers made a strong impression on me, even with no conscious sense that I might be interested in making those same kinds of pictures. I think what attracted me to that work was that the subjects were ordinary people, like Disfarmer’s folks from Herber Springs, Arkansas.

ALThose are extraordinary.

DBIrving Penn did the Small Trades Pictures. These were of ordinary people in their workaday clothes who he brought to the studio. And then Avedon had a range of subjects. For the most part, the work made by photographers whom I started to look at in the ’70s was interesting because the subjects, by and large, were ordinary people. That clued me into this idea that ordinary people could be the subject in the making of resonant photographs.

ALBut it was clear in your mind that a photographer, like Disfarmer, was not an art photographer. Can you talk about encountering Roy DeCarava’s work in Langston Hughes’s project? You realized that DeCarava’s photographs weren’t photojournalism and that the kind of work you were doing could become art. It could be self-motivated, it could have intentions, and it could be poetic and powerful.

DBOh yeah, DeCarava and Langston Hughes’sThe Sweet Fly Paper of Life. Early on, I had absolutely no sense of genre. This idea that there was photojournalism, fine art, or commercial photography . . . I just gravitated toward what I thought were interesting pictures. When you think about it, some of Irving Penn’s photographs look very much like Mike Disfarmer’s photographs, even though they were working with very different purposes.

ALThat’s very true.

DBDisfarmer was the neighborhood photographer from Herber Springs, and Penn was a highly successful commercial and art photographer working in New York City. But for very different reasons, they both end up with these ordinary people standing in front of the camera. For Penn, it was a project. For Disfarmer, it was a job. It was the service that Disfarmer provided to the community. Whereas, for Avedon, it was his own personal work, in contrast to the thing that he did commercially. But then Roy DeCarava was a particularly important revelation for me, even though I didn’t get the full impact of his work until I was able to stand in front of it.

ALIn front of a real print.

DBThe Sweet Fly Paper of Life was a very inexpensive publication.

ALThere’s so much darkness that doesn’t reproduce well in the book. I’m thinking of Black skin in particular. The shadows are also so important.

DBThose were not fine reproductions inThe Sweet Fly Paper of Life, at least not in the monographic sense. But I was intrigued by DeCarava’s photographs for the fact that they were interestingly made pictures that were clearly not of the Gordon Parks-documentary type. They were also not photojournalism. They didn’t seem to serve any function besides a self-expressive one, which was probably why DeCarava had such a difficult time getting that work published. And then he showed it to Langston Hughes, who said, “Well, why don’t you let me write some text for these pictures? Maybe I can get a publisher interested.” The photographs were highly expressive in a subjective way, and they were pictures of Black people in Harlem in the 1950s. This idea of using the camera expressively and doing that with subjects who, again, were ordinary subjects, ordinary African Americans, didn’t makeThe Sweet Fly Paper of Life an easily publishable book. Eventually, Simon & Schuster published it in 1955. I was impressed by DeCarava’s vocabulary, both his formal vocabulary and later, when I was able to stand in front of the work and see it, his material vocabulary.

ALThe medium of the work. I’d seen single pictures here and there and also reproductions of his work, but I agree with you that viewing them in person is astonishing. I still remember the one person show that he had at MoMA,Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective (1996). It was such an extraordinary event. But what was important for me when I saw his work was that he’s talking about a difficult subject. He engages with the notion of the difficult lives of Black people, the social and economic strife. But then he’s not afraid of using beauty or form to describe the moments, and it was that kind of tension that he was able to build and construct that was always so rich and challenging and interesting.

DBDeCarava devised a singular language for using the medium to talk about those things, the lives of Black folks and the Black artists and musicians who were his friends. And then gave those things an incredibly rich formal and material beauty, even if some of the circ*mstances were difficult. There’s a photograph that he made . . . It’s a Black woman being arrested at a demonstration. And she’s suspended. She’s clearly off the ground as she’s being held. But he doesn’t stand back to show you, to illustrate the whole thing. He’s still applying his very concise, rigorous visual language to describe that situation. So that the true weight of the situation emerges slowly rather than seeing the whole thing, and thinking, “Oh my God, that’s what’s happening?” He never lost sight of the need to shape those circ*mstances within the language that he was developing. And that’s why I came to relate so strongly to his work. Even though I didn’t have much sense of genre, I knew I didn’t want to work for a newspaper. I didn’t want to be a staff photographer. I didn’t want to be an ambulance chaser who also photographed football games or—

ALI understand. You didn’t want to be switching gears. Yeah.

DBDeCarava put the naive idea in my head, at that time, that I could be an artist with this. How I was I going to sustain myself? Who knows. But he became the embodiment of that possibility. What I didn’t know is that he was also at that time a contract photographer forSports Illustrated. But he kept those activities completely separate. I have no idea what those pictures he was making forSports Illustrated looked like, but they clearly could not have looked like the pictures he was making for himself.

The way this man manipulated the medium of photography in a highly subjective and expressive way was also a part of the work’s narrative about the Black subject. DeCarava had a profound influence on me, and he remains so important for me. He was a Black photographer who was working expressively within the medium rather than for publication. There was no apparent use for this work other than for it to be on a wall in a gallery or a museum and for someone to stand in front of it and have a different sense of what a photograph could be and of how the world might be reshaped through that experience. DeCarava became a singular presence for me, in a similar way that John Coltrane was musically. Between the two of them, they’ve inspired and kept me on track all these years.

ALDid understanding how important his work was and realizing that having the life of an artist—an artist-photographer, a fine art photographer—was possible give you renewed motivation and commitment to your Harlem project,Harlem U.S.A. (1975-1979)?

DBFrom hanging around the Studio Museum in Harlem in the mid-to-late ’70s, I began to meet other Black photographers like Jules Allen and Frank Stewart. I taught at Studio Museum in Harlem for a little while in 1977, and Carrie Mae Weems was a student in that first class I ever taught there. For all of us, DeCarava was the center of our aspirational conversations. We singularly held him in high regard. So, he was the common denominator among all the younger and older black photographers that I began to meet and form community with. I met most of the photographers who were and had been a part of theKamoinge Workshop. [A collective of Black photographers established in NYC in 1963. Members met to show and discuss each other’s work and to share their critical perspectives, technical and professional experience. Kamoinge members were committed to photography’s power as an art form.]

ALRight.

DBI initially formed the closest relationships with those older photographers, primarily Lou Draper and Shawn Walker, and then I started showing them my work. It was a process of both building a community and also sustaining a rigorous conversation that allowed us to push and challenge each other. With DeCarava as our aspirational goal post, we were really trying to make something that was worthy of contributing to that conversation. What happened after several years within the Studio Museum in Harlem community—which was also partially the community at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library—was that we all began to, for the first time, exhibit our work. I mentioned earlier, I was a student at the School of Visual Arts for two years in the mid-1970s.

ALDeCarava was self-taught, right? Did you enroll at SVA because you were encouraged to go to college, and did you chose SVA because they had a photography program?

DBWell, DeCarava had studied painting, drawing, and printmaking at the Harlem Community Art Center before turning belatedly to photography. He was also teaching at Cooper Union, which I knew little to nothing about. But SVA eventually came on my radar.

ALSo, how did you end up there?

DBI didn’t know much at all about SVA. I had a very brief academic career at Queensborough Community College, where I went because I lived in Queens. I didn’t know much about academia aside from being interested in music and photography. I had no idea how the academic thing played into any of this. But I did take a photography class when I was a student at Queensborough Community College, from which I didn’t graduate. I mean I did a lot of things there and it was a good and interesting experience. I was president of the Black Student Union there. My band played there. I started the student publicationsJohari andMwenea with my friend and fellow student Gerald Gladney. I invited speakers like Dick Gregory to campus, along with musicians like Milford Graves and Ornette Coleman. I did everything but go to class and graduate. I seemed to have been more interested in creating meaningful real-world experiences than sitting in class, which didn’t resonate with me the same way. But one day, the person who was teaching photography came in and he had a big portfolio case. And on the side of it was a sticker, School of Visual Arts, SVA. And I’m like, Oh wow, there’s actually a school where you can go to do this?

ALGo and study art, yeah.

DBYeah, to study art! I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know. And so SVA stuck in my mind. And as I continued making my photographs, I decided to check out this School of Visual Arts. So, I contacted them and made an appointment to show them my portfolio. Chronologically, this is 1975 or ’76, even before my experience at Studio Museum, when I began to get a sense of some of the professional protocols of presenting work and photographs. Before then, I had no idea; I put some rubber cement on the back of those pictures.(laughter) On 11x14 inch boards with my 8x10 prints and went to SVA with fifteen of them and I don’t even remember what I put those pictures in, how I carried them. So, I showed up for my admissions interview with my rubber cemented prints, some of the first photographs I started making in Harlem, other things I’d been making in Brooklyn. And they took my photographs and then they disappeared for a long time. I remember getting nervous and thinking, What are they doing with my pictures? Who could they be talking to? And then the woman who came back with my pictures told me, “We really like this work; we think we want to accept you and we’d also like to offer you a scholarship.”

ALWow.

DBAll I could say was thank you. Because that was the first time anyone had passed any kind of critical judgment on anything I was making.

ALRight.

DBThese were definitely prints that had been developed and printed in my mother’s kitchen—that’s how far along I was when I applied to SVA, the rubber cement on the back of them, and then I cleaned the edges up with a rubber cement eraser and took them in. But they were sufficiently impressed that they offered me a scholarship which, of course, opened up a whole other community for me in terms of some of the teachers who were teaching there. Sid Kaplan was teaching printing and Kaplan had printed for Robert Frank, and Frank had printed for Diane Arbus. I didn’t know all of this then, but I began to find out who these people were. And mostly they were very supportive of my work, so it was very reassuring. One of those teachers, Larry Siegel, invited me to come over to this place that he ran—he had actually started it—on East 14th Street, which turned out to be the Midtown Y Photography Gallery. And I became a part of that community over a long period of time. Then Larry left as director and Sy Rubin took over, and I became friends with Sy. Then Sy Rubin left and Michael Spano became director in 1983and we became very good friends. At this point, I started to hear about Yale because Spano had graduated from Yale and started showing a lot of the young photographers—

AL—who went to Yale.

DBExactly, who were coming out of Yale. He had gone there himself. So, I started to become, by osmosis, though not by degree, a part of that group.

ALMidtown Y was an extraordinary place. When did it close? In the late ’90s, right?

DBProbably the mid-to-late nineties. I started hanging out there from 1977.

ALI remember seeing some shows. I don’t think that it had the same kind of community by then that it had before we started grad school, but it was still a really important place.

DBBack then it was one of the very few places that a photographer in New York could hope to have their photographs exhibited.And because of the people who came through there, especially after Spano became director, and because of his close relationship with MoMA, their photography curator, Peter Galassi, started to show up at all the openings. Spano brought a different community to Midtown Y Photography Gallery.

ALRight.

DBI left SVA after two years because I applied to the Cultural Council Foundation CETA Artists Project. It was a project that I heard about. They were hiring artists in every discipline for this federal work program that was modeled on the WPA. Hiring artists and then having them work in cultural institutions. I had taught one class at Jamaica Arts Center, which was in my community. They knew I was interested in photography so they asked me to teach. I was like, Well I know how to develop film, I know how to print. I didn’t know much more than that. The woman who ran the education programs at the Jamaica Art Center would later go on to run the education program at Studio Museum in Harlem—an artist by the name ofJanet Olivia Henry. One day Janet told me there’s a program that’s starting called CETA. And it was based on federal money that was being released, and the Secretary of Labor, Ernie Green, who is very much connected to the New York cultural community, had written a provision into the Comprehensive Employment Training Act for artists. They adapted the language so that artists could also be hired. And Janet told me I should go to the local manpower office and pick up an application.

So, of course I go to the local manpower office a day or two later, and who’s sitting behind the desk giving out the applications? None other than Janet. And increasingly I began to realize that I was really functioning inside of a community. And a lot of the people in that community were institutionally engaged in a lot of different organizations and platforms and that’s what began to sustain me. I was good enough to be able to do a certain amount of freelance work, like photographing openings. Show up with my camera, put the flash on automatic, and photograph the event. I knew how to make a good picture and photograph whoever’s opening it was. And those institutions, like Studio Museum in Harlem, began to support me with that kind of practical work. Then I got good at photographing installations and art objects. So, they gave me tangible work. 1979 was the first time where I had a solo exhibition of my own work,Harlem U.S.A.,and that was at Studio Museum in Harlem.

ALYour street pictures, right?

DBYeah, my street pictures from Harlem. There’s a lot of history, but it was all taking place for me inside of an expanding sense of community. And everyone I met was connected to a different institution or a different organizational structure that was sustaining not only me, but a lot of us at that time.

ALAnd that early Harlem work was also a way for you to connect with the local community out in the street with the everyday person. Some you knew, some you didn’t know.

DBYeah. The subjects of those early Harlem photographs were all strangers initially.

ALSo, that was really an expansive way of building that community as well.

DBWell, it was making pictures within a certain tradition, but making them in the Black community of Harlem. The Black community as subject of street or documentary photographs. That was part of the social and political culture that I came out of. The kind of humanist and populist culture that I came out of in the ’60s. I was very politically and socially engaged when I was very young. I joined the Black Panther Party when I was, I think, maybe fifteen years old. And I came of age in the late ’60s and there was a phrase at that time that a lot of us bought into and took into all kinds of other areas of our lives. That phrase was, You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. And none of us wanted to be part of the problem. So, whatever you were doing, whether it was as an artist or anything else, your work in some ways had to be responsive to that. You had to be socially engaged and accountable, even as all these other things were in play, in terms of the quality of the work, the rigor, understanding the history, understanding what it means to make photographs at a certain level. By then, I was reading John Szarkowski’sLooking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

ALIs this before the Harlem show or after the Harlem show that you met John Szarkowski?

DBI met Szarkowski after I took the Harlem photographs to MoMA on a drop-off day before I had my show of that work at Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. By then, I had started looking at a lot of photographs in books and slowly started going out to see photographs on the wall. Before I had myHarlem U.S.A. show at Studio Museum, I had seen the Disfarmer show around 1977 at MoMA. The big Avedon show at Marlborough, was in 1975. Irving Penn was probably late in 1977.

I saw a big Harry Callahan show at the Met. I wasn’t interested in making those kinds of pictures, but I really loved Callahan’s photographs. Still, I knew that wasn’t going to be my path. You know, I was just trying to deeply steep myself in the history, as well as trying to figure out, What am I going to do? The Harlem pictures came out of, certainly, seeing the work of Walker Evans, and it also came out of, in some ways, Disfarmer. It came out of all of this work that I’d been looking at and applying in terms of ideas to my own subjects. And that included a range of ideas because I was making spontaneous photographs like Henri Cartier-Bresson. I was doing Bresson the way Roy DeCarava had done Cartier-Bresson.

ALWith much more subtly and more engagement . . . I mean, I love Cartier-Bresson’s work, but—

DBYeah, the ideas were starting there.

ALSo, speaking of being socially and politically engaged as your younger self, what did you feel photography could help contribute to the conversation? Because you’ve said that the most radical art is not protest art.What impact did you feel your work could have?

DBIt’s interesting because as a very young, socially and politically engaged person, my arguments were completely rhetorical and didactic, and very absolute. Right and wrong.

ALBlack and white. No, in between.

DBYeah. No gray area at all. But when it came to making pictures, I took a much more nuanced, craft-driven approach. You know, because having absorbed the lessons of so many photographers, I felt beholden to something more than rhetoric, if that makes sense.

ALI get it.

DBI felt beholden to that piece of the history that I had been responding to. I wanted to extend that and also apply that history to the Black subject in a way that elevated the Black subject in the photograph, in a way that cut through the stereotypical, more socially pathologically driven representations of African American subjects in photographs. I started out wanting to make work in opposition to those kinds of stereotypical pathology-driven photographs. But as I began working and immersing myself in the work, that receded to the point where my ambition was to make the most honest, clear-eyed, resonant representation of what was in front of me. The work that I did would offset and contest those stereotypes rather than having to take them on directly and make what was termed “positive Black images.”

ALRight.

DBIt’s a very didactic, un-nuanced way to think about the ways in which photographs have the capacity to work. Cause I wanted the work to hold its own as photographs as well. I wanted to participate in the medium and the craft at that level. And I wanted to participate in it using subjects that were African American. And for me, my work was always about both of those things: A conversation with the history of the medium and a conversation about the subject, with neither one being more or less important than the other. I held myself to a very high standard of picture-making. Even though at the time I was making them, I wouldn’t have put it to you that pointedly. But that’s exactly what I was doing, you know? This idea that what we’re engaged in is somehow translating the world into interesting pictures. And of course, that philosophy is what landed me in the Yale Photography Department, all those years later, in 1991.

ALI mean, it’s a true love and understanding of the medium, wanting to use it for self-expression and then trusting that the medium could provide a rich conversation that is open, that is enlightening. Hopefully.

DBI believe that if your practice of making the work is rigorous enough and intentional enough, and with serious regard for the medium itself, it will have some real resonance. It was clear to me that intention alone was not enough; it was how you used the particular things that the camera and photographs have the capacity to do formally, optically, to really understand what the lens is doing. You have to understand materiality. That lesson of DeCarava’s that the photograph is not just a picture of something, it’s an actualmade object. And what do you want that thing to do when it’s on the wall? And that’s not a rhetorical question.

ALIt makes me think of what Richard Benson would say: You have an intention, you make it, and then it becomes something else, right? And you have to realize it’s new potential, whether it’s good or not, and run with it. And then let it go in the world. By then, it’s doing its own thing.

DBIt is. You need the world to make the photograph. But once you’ve made the photograph, the photograph is its own thing.

And it’s not merely a visual transcription of what you saw. It’s something else and it has to be engaging on its own terms. Had I decided to go to grad school and gone to University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) or Cal Arts with that attitude, they would have ripped me to shreds. That’s a very modernist notion—this emphasis on the object—that the meaning resides, at least partially, in the object or photograph itself.

ALYeah, your photograph’s title would be a page long, right?(laughter)

DBThey would’ve ripped me to shreds. They were more interested in theory and critical verbiage than the actual work.

ALI think what’s very indicative is that your titles are so simple and succinct.

DBYeah, they didn’t believe that at all out there, which is why I didn’t go there because I had friends, including Carrie Mae Weems, who went to UC San Diego. UC San Diego was recruiting very heavily at that time. Tuition waiver, stipend, room and board. . . It was almost like going away on a residency for years. So, Carrie Mae went and then—

AL —Lorna Simpson went there, too.

DBLorna was one of my SVA undergrad classmates. So, Lorna went there and then Albert Chong, who I also knew from SVA, went there. And they were all trying to entice me to go to UC San Diego. And I was not a theory queen, I didn’t want to go mix it up with those people. I believe in making, that the discourse comes from the object. And your main purpose is to make objects that compel that conversation, not to have a conversation that results in a particularly made object within a very narrow theoretical or conceptual construct. I had had a lot of friends who came out of the Yale Photography department before I ever thought seriously about going. Michael Spano, William Earle Williams. I met Abe Morell back in 1975, and then Abe went to Yale. The one thing that they all had in common, including the older generation of artists that I knew, like Howardena Pindell and William T. Williams, was that they were all rigorous makers of things. Like, you came out of there ready to rock and roll andmake something. You couldn’t go there and sit around talking about something. And you know that about the program as well. The amount of work that we were required to put up every two or three weeks was grueling, and if you didn’t keep up, you knew that you might get called into that little office upstairs and get kicked out of the program because we saw it happen.

AL Yeah, that’s right, in addition to crying after. But it’s extraordinary that you knew back then what the right kind of school and the right kind of thinking and process was for you. Not all young artists are so clear.

DB Well, I was thirty-eight years old. I was fortunate in that over a few decades, I actually had friends who had come out of Yale and I respected all of them; and their works were completely different, but they were all rigorous picture makers who could be counted on, year after year, week after week, decade after decade, to make the work. That’s what we do. And that’s what I believe in. Get out there and make the work. And so that was my conscious decision to go there. I knew how deeply rigorous and even problematically rigorous the program was. I had been tipped off on all of that and I also knew about Richard Benson. I wanted to get next to Richard Benson for two years. I didn’t tell him that during my admission interview.

ALHow did you first hear about him?

DB Ah, because I was someone who is an information junkie about all things photography. And Calvin Tompkins did a big profile.

AL Yeah, theNew Yorker profile of him.

DB Yeah. And I’d read that.

AL Weall read that.

DBI read it several times and was like, I want to meet this man; and if I had the opportunity to sit in the same room with this man for two years, I want to be there. I remember at the admissions interview with Richard “Chip” Benson, some of the students asked me, “Why do you want to come here? You’ve been working already.”

AL Why do you want to go to school?

DB I still remember my response. I said, “I can’t even tell you what it is. But I know if I’m in a program with this man, I am going to learn something that I don’t yet know.” So, while I can’t even tell you what it is, I have to believe that being in a program with him, I’m going to know something coming out that I didn’t know coming in. And I did. I tell everybody who wants an honest assessment, “I didn’t know how to print until I met Chip.”

AL That’s the way I felt. I didn’t know how to look at a print until I met Chip.

DB Yeah, I was making work, I was exhibiting, but I didn’t know how to print until I met Chip in 1991. I will say that to anyone because that’s like studying saxophone with John Coltrane.

You know what I mean? That’s as good as it gets. So even though I had a little bit more, and in some cases, a lot more experience than some of my fellow classmates in grad school, I never once regretted the decision to be there, in practical terms, because when I came into the field in the mid-seventies, the whole professionalization of the field hadn’t yet happened. I don’t think a single one of my teachers at SVA—other than Shelley Rice, who I really liked and who was teaching art history and critical writing—had a BFA or MFA. These were people who were printing for Robert Frank, and they were just presumed to be the best and they were teaching. That whole professionalization of the field was actually beginning with that generation of us in the ’70s who were at the School of Visual Arts. And all of a sudden, you had to have a BFA if you wanted to do this. The academic professionalization system was beginning to build itself. Next thing you knew, there were certain things that probably weren’t going to happen for you if you didn’t have the MFA.

AL Even though Chip didn’t go to college.

DB Exactly. And Tod Papageorge had a BA in English Literature, I think. But they’re the generation ahead, when there was no expectation that you had a BFA or MFA in the area in which you were practicing. So, part of my being at Yale was an acknowledgement that one had to engage with the field differently if you had any serious intention of moving through the field professionally.

AL Well, you also knew you wanted to teach and at that point, the MFA was becoming critical to one’s career in academia.

DB Yeah. I had been doing a little bit of adjunct teaching at Empire State College, but that was only one class. You weren’t going to get much further at that point without that degree, no matter how much you actually knew.

AL I’m still so thrilled that we went when we went because, aside from you, no one was really showing. I was thrilled when I saw your picture at MoMA one day in ’92. I wandered into the museum’s new acquisition room and there was one of your great street photographs.

DB (laughter) Yeah. When Peter Galassi visited Yale, I think he thought I was teaching there, and I didn’t correct him. I already knew Peter.

ALYou were so modest and low key about everything.

DB Because I wasn’t there to let everybody know that I had already been doing this for fifteen years. I was there to see what else I could get out of it, and also because I knew who a lot of the people were at Yale who were teaching outside of the program. It’s always a bad idea if you’re someone with a bit more experience to promote yourself if you’re in grad school. It’s pretty much frowned upon. Lois Conner and I had both gotten a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) grant several years before and had shown together. So, I had met her before coming to Yale, where she was on faculty and one of our professors. Michael Roemer, the filmmaker, was teaching there and I knew who he was. It was more about what I could learn than what I had done up to that point. I had come up in New York in a solid community of support and in conversation with a lot of other artists, but these were folks I’d never met, even though I knew their names and their work.I was like, I’ve got to take classes with them. So, I took classes with Michael Roemer, for instance, almost every semester I was there.

AL I remember.

DB I knew about his filmNothing but a Man,which was kind of legendary to film geeks and students of African American film history. And that was an extraordinary experience being in Michael Roemer’s class. And then Robert Farris Thompson!

AL Thompson, yep.

DB Man, Thompson was legendary to all of us in the Black art community in New York. We all knew who he was. We had read his books,African Art in Motionand Flash of the Spirit.We all talked about him, and some had even gone to New Haven from New York to audit his classes as non-students.So, the opportunity to meet and study with Robert Farris Thompson and have Michael Roemer look at your films every week was something I really looked forward to. And again, it was rigorous. And that’s what I loved. Michael Roemer would give a theme and then you had to shoot, edit, and present a ten-minute film every week! Every week! Not come and talk film theory or history. He did do a seminar class too but for the making class, you had to produce a ten-minute film, not five-minutes. You couldn’t cheat. And then Sheila de Bretteville was there. I knew who she was also.

I knew about the Womanhouse in LA in the early 1970s and Sheila’s role in that. I became very close to Sheila during my time at Yale. I would take my work over to the Graphic Design department where she was chair and show it to Sheila in her office. I showed my work to Michael Roemer because I held these people in high regard and I’m here for two years now, and it kind of behooves me not to merely stay inside of the Photography Department, but to really engage with these significant figures in other departments and disciplines.

AL Right. But the atmosphere was different during our years there in the early ’90s and then it started changing in the sense that we never really talked about the future, like a career. We never discussed it. And I’m sure it was the same in other programs. It was about experimenting, learning, changing. Thinking about your ideas and applying your ideas. It was really a different time. And as much as I felt unprepared when I came out of the program, I quickly realized, Well, maybe I’m unprepared. I didn’t know how to apply for grants; I didn’t even know what grants existed. But I developed a tough skin, I knew what it meant to work. I knew what it meant to try and learn from failing. You know, all those things. We had some special two years.

DB Yeah, and of course the Photography Department at Yale, at least at that time, had a very close relationship to the Photography Department at MoMA. The Photography Department at MoMA looked very closely at the work that was coming out of Yale’s Photography program. We had Susan Kismaric at Yale as critic, and she was a curator in the Photography Department at MoMA.

There was a very close relationship between MoMA and Yale, even though it was largely unspoken. If you had any savvy at all, you realized you were being given access to some very important people in the field; you were starting a conversation with them.

AL It’s true. You’re right. I felt comfortable taking my work to MoMA on Thursdays. Not exactly comfortable, you know—everyone always gets nervous—but we did it, right? That was part of the thing. We went to all the shows.

DB And that access was extraordinary for an institution like MoMA. But only for photographers because we were the only ones who could put twenty-five pictures in a reasonably sized—

AL —box, or manilla envelope.

DB Now, painters can’t put twenty paintings in a case and go drop them off for consideration at a museum on an ongoing basis. But the fact that at MoMA, every Thursday, anybody could bring a portfolio of pictures and they would literally go through every portfolio that came through. That was a known ritual that was part of what it meant to be a photographer working in New York City with the aspirations of an artist.

AL Right,you would walk in to pick up your portfolio and you hoped they would call you in the back.

DB I forget how it worked. If you dropped it off, did you come back the next day?

ALSomething like that, or the same afternoon. And then, sometimes they would just hand it back to you.(laughter)

DB All the portfolios are at the front reception desk. And they’d ask, What’s your name; and then look it up and then give you yours. But then, every now and then, the thing happened that you hoped for: Your portfolio wasn’t there because—

AL —they want to talk to you, yeah.

DB To have those very same people now, in the room, in the MFA program that we were in at Yale . . . I understand that some people have called it a conspiracy or a club, but the truth of the matter is there was no more rigorous photography program in the country at the time than what was coming out of Yale, maybe also upstate, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which was a very different kind of aesthetic. Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Charles Clough, and that group all came out of there and ended up founding and exhibiting at Hallways, and then eventually they all ended up with Metro Pictures. The Pictures Generation. But if you were a curator and wanted to have some sense of where some of the best photography work might be coming from, it wasn’t a bad idea to look at the work that was coming out of the program at Yale. That’s just how it was. But I have to say, even with everything that I have done, there were some things that I realized were not going to happen unless I did that. I’m an information junkie, I had looked at the CV of everybody who got a Guggenheim in photography.

AL You surprise me . . .(laughter)

DB I’d look to see what they did and what they didn’t do. That tells you what you needed to do, you know? I probably applied for the Guggenheim at least two times and nothing happened. I didn’t get the Guggenheim until after I came out of Yale.And I have tosay, the work was not radically different.

AL You applied with the Harlem work?

DB No, I applied with some color Street Portrait photographs from the early 2000s made with the 4x5 camera. But certain people in the field just needed to know that you took yourself seriously enough to go through that kind of rigor for two years. That you thought enough of yourself and your work to invest in your work in that way. And if you did, there were people who were willing to support you. And if not, there were other ways, there were other support structures. But if you wantedthat, it was very clear what the process and the protocols and the credentialing was what might lead you to it. Of course, at the end of the day, it was about the work. Because not everyone who came out of any program could say that they were met with the same level of success. But it would also be true to say that it did enhance your chances a little bit of having that kind of attention drawn to your work. But, quite frankly, the work that was coming out of that program at that time, having to put up twenty new photographs every two or three weeks . . . I remember the number was twenty. And then if somebody put up twenty-five, that became the new number. It was all for the good of the work. It was rigorous, it was tough. But that’s what it takes if you really want to do this. I was older. I was probably the oldest one in our class.

AL Yeah. You had Ramon.

DB I had Ramon. My son had just been born, and I was married to Candida Alvarez. We left New York and moved to, of all places, New Haven. There was a good deal of sacrifice but certainly, because my son had just been born, it also let me know that if I was going to do this, I needed to do this now; otherwise, stop talking about it because I was doing a certain amount of editorial work and freelance work, but I had zero investment in that work. That’s not the career that I wanted. And it was clear that if I was going to have the career that I wanted to have, or aspired to, there were things that I needed to do. And Carrie Mae Weems was the one who kept telling me, “Dawoud, you might want to think about grad school.” Over and over. And next thing you know, eighteen months later, she was already finished with grad school.(laughter) So when Ramon was born that really gave me the push that I needed to go ahead and do it.

AL Did going to Yale further shape your thinking as a teacher?

DB Oh, certainly. The experience of those weekly crits and those conversations, and even the experience of finally cajoling Benson into the dark room to show me what he did. I was bold because he kept telling me, “I want you to try this, try that.” And I said, “Chip, why don’t you come in and show me?” And he would look at me because he knew what I was trying to do. I said, “Come in the dark room and show me.” And when he did, then he said, “Put that paper in the developer.” And when that print came out, there it was. And I had seen him make it. So, for me, both for the rigor of the critical conversation and also, mainly, for Richard’s piercing insight. The way that he would always look for that thing that he thought he needed to tell you about whatever it is you were attempting to do. Or the questions that he would ask. Coming out of that program and for a long time after, I tried to embody in the best of my teaching what I took from the experience of having Richard Benson as a professor. Because he cared deeply. And he had investment in you, even as the criticism could be hard and sometimes pointed. But I never heard him say a wrong thing.

AL Well, he did tell me, Don’t have a second child.(laughter) He didn’t say it but he meant, It’s going to ruin your life as an artist.

DB And one thing he would always tell me, because I came in working with the 4x5 camera, was to not be so rigid and precise in how I used it. So, I already had that large camera experience. Because I remember the day when all those new 4x5 cameras came into the program and it was like, Everybody put away your 35mm camera—we’re gonna do a different thing! Lois Conner started showing everyone how to use the view camera.

AL In our year, how many people were using the view camera? It was you, me, Veronica Johnson.

DB Yeah, not a lot. They were trying to introduce us to another way of thinking about making the work and a more intentional, premeditated, less street photography and spontaneous way. Fortunately, I already had one. I bought a secondhand field camera before I got to the program and had already been using it to make my “Street Portraits.” But the thing that Benson would always say to me—and it was true, and Roy DeCarava beat me up about this one time—was that I tried to frame so precisely so that I would never have to crop. Cropping was like sacrosanct: Just don’t do it.

AL I agree with you.

DB And Chip would always say, “Dawoud, why don’t you take a half a step back? Just take half a step back.” He said, “If you’re back too far, you can always trim the edges later in the print, but half a step back, because sometimes you’re so close to the edge, that it is a half a step back picture.” I just came to call them that after Chip and that constant remark. I still hear him in my head when I’m out there working, trying to frame things so precisely, I remember to just take a half a step back.

AL Chip thought the Polaroid was a disaster as a material, remember? He wouldn’t take into consideration that the act of giving that print to the subject was so important, right? Same thing with color. Color was hopeless. Yeah, that’s the word he used: Hopeless. The Polaroid was hopeless. Color was hopeless. And then he ended up using color within a few months.

DBIt was an extraordinary experience working with him. He was both so conservative and yet the most materially and technologically sophisticated person I’d ever met.

AL Did you feel at all misunderstood at times during the critiques or not heard?

DB Misunderstood? No, I mean, I didn’t care. I understood that it was all subjective feedback and not really meant to be literally instructive, not for me anyway. I was a little older and less inclined to need that kind of criticism or approval. We had Ramon so nothing was more important than that. You could have said anything you wanted to about my work at that point. My priorities were different, as they should be once you have children. My work had already been validated in other ways, with inclusion in more than a few shows, and I gotten a number of grants and fellowships so I didn’t need validation that way. I would just always listen for that thing that was the most useful and let everything else just pass over my head. I remember Lois suggested I make painted backdrops, instead of going out in the streets. I don’t remember what I said, but I knew that that was nothing I was ever going to do. Maybe she was thinking I could make something in conversation with James Van Der Zee’s historical studio portraits, since he used painted backdrops. But no, I didn’t feel compelled to respond directly to everything that was said about my work, and certainly didn’t feel misunderstood.

AL Right.

DB I was pretty well formed by the time I got there. Probably the most ambitious thing I did when I got to Yale was to start working in the studio. Up until that point, all of the photographs I had made were in the streets or maybe a few indoors, but they were all made in the natural environment.

But I wanted to push myself to do something different, both in the basem*nt studios there in the Yale Photo department and eventually in the 20X24 Polaroid Studio. I actually made a portrait of you. I started doing these first singles and multiples. That’s in the studio. And then I started working—

AL —with Polaroid.

DB I already had that relationship with Polaroid. They had been providing me with the Type 55 film through the Polaroid Artist Support Program, which I heard about through Michael Spano. I was pretty well formed, but at the same time, it was a deeply meaningful experience that served me well afterwards. And also, the daily rigor of making work, the habit of it. I’m finally getting to the point where I’m not working the same way, feeling like I have to absolutely be working.

AL Because you had exposed your 50,000 negatives at this point, right?

DB (laughter) Yeah. I don’t work that way anymore. But I do get anxious when I’m not working that I need to get back to work because I have ideas that I want to explore. Things that I want to make in relation to work that I’ve made. I always see the work from project to project. Building a larger project. A larger idea. But, for me, right now it’s about history and landscape which, of course, is working in the space of the landscape. No one told me that I would be here.

AL A landscape photographer?

DB As much as I loved those kinds of pictures made within that tradition, I never saw myself working that way. And I didn’t really understand how to make those kinds of pictures. Even though, as I look up at my bookshelf, I have what I would call the foundational landscape photographers. Everyone from Emmet Gowin, Frank Gohlke—

AL —and Robert Adams.

DB I love that work. I just never saw myself being directly in conversation with that work. You know, Joel Sternfeld was assigned to be my advisor at Yale. I met with Joel. I don’t remember what his title was, probably visiting critic, but I was supposed to meet with him—maybe it was second year—every Wednesday.

AL Oh. I don’t remember that.

DB Every Wednesday. I remember Tod [Papageorge] asking me once, “Dawoud, did you meet with Joel?”(laughter) And it was funny because I was doing so many things outside of the classroom while I was in the program. I even did a residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art for eight weeks while I was there.

AL I remember you took time off. You were traveling back and forth.

DB Oh, it was crazy. And you couldn’t take time off or you’d be thrown out of the program as I’d clearly been told. And one day, I came to class, and I was so tired and dizzy from all of the traveling back and forth from Andover, Massachusetts to New Haven. Tod asked me if I had met with Joel, and I had but I couldn’t even remember because I had just gotten back from Andover, maybe on the first train that morning, and was so tired I was moving on autopilot.

AL Well, you certainly took advantage of everything that was offered.

DB Tod knew I was dizzy because I told him yes and then he immediately asked me, “What did he say?”(laughter) I mean, I did meet with him, but I couldn’t even remember what he said. But since going out to look at work in the 1970s and ’80s, I've been very steeped in landscape photographs like Joel’s work. For the longest time, that’s not the kind of work that I was making; I was showing Joel my portraits. But clearly, I have a foundation in that work and am deeply familiar with that tradition.

AL I definitely want to talk about landscape and I don’t know if you remember, but I was forbidden to photograph indoors because I was photographing these boundaries and I’d done it for so long and I kept churning it out and basically it was like, You cannot photograph indoors anymore. So, I tried landscape. And I think that was the worst crit anyone could have had at that point in the program. I did not cry until I walked out of the print room and then you gave me a big hug and you said, “Are you okay?” I kind of was on the edge of crying. But yeah, I still—

DB Did it move you outside? Did it move you away from photographing indoors?

AL Well, I made those landscapes, and they were horrible. And now, I understand it was because that Connecticut landscape didn’t make sense to me. There was no projection of history or scale that I could see even though I didn’t really understand that’s what I was looking for.

DB Yeah.

AL As soon as I arrived in Vietnam, that’s all I could see. That’s also what’s so important in your landscape: The notion of scale and layering it with history—for instance that of the Underground Railroad in the series,Night Coming Tenderly, Black. In your landscape work, you bring the history into the present. So maybe we can talk about that.

DB You’re absolutely right. Once I was in a place that mattered, and where there was something that I needed to talk about, the form figured itself out. There was no longer a mystery. If you want to talk about this, you turn the camera here. You understand how to make a good photograph. It stems from both a deep interest and response to that place, whether through experience or research, and a desire to talk about your own response to that place. ForNight Coming Tenderly, Black, I spent a lot of time at the Western Reserve Historical Society reading slave narratives, researching known Underground Railroad “stations,” and looking at historical photographs, trying to get a feel for the place and the history. Along with the research, the subjective response gives you a compelling reason to be there. You may not be immediately clear about the shape and form of photographs you want to make, but you do know why you’re there, why it matters, and the form eventually evolves from that.

AL You knew where to place your body, and by extension the camera.

DB Exactly! But before that, it seemed like a highly genred thing to me. Like, I love Lois Conner’s pictures. I love that work; they are exquisitely seen—and in a broad range of places from China to New York City, and then hand printed in exquisite platinum and palladium prints—but I couldn't be that invested in that kind of work to go outside right now where I live and make those kinds of pictures. It’s not what I’m thinking about. I prefer to be in a place that I’m invested in and really have something to say about that particular place that relates to a narrative about Blackness in the American landscape, to foreground that as the narrative and as the response to place. I found that it was difficult, initially. But eventually, I was able to see the pictures that I was trying to make. I think part of the problem with my transition to landscape on a practical level was also that I stopped working with a view camera. I changed to a medium format rangefinder camera. I did that thing that generally I discourage students from doing. If you’re going to change something in your work, you change one thing at a time. You don’t change everything. Don’t use a different camera and a different subject because now you’re just completely unmoored from any of your good habits. But I’d gotten to the point where I couldn’t continue without an assistant, and I prefer when I’m out in the world to work alone. To carry that 4x5 camera and heavy tripod on my shoulder, my bag, it all just got to be, physically—

AL It’s too much.

DB It’s gone now, but for a while I had a constant pain in my shoulder from the weight of that tripod just settling there, usually with the camera on it, as I walked the streets casually looking for something. So, I downsized.

AL It’s not a badge of courage to lug that view camera and the film holders around.

DB Really! But it was easy and comfortable initially, when I was younger. And now I’m working with a rangefinder camera, the Mamiya 7. It’s as compositionally imprecise as a view camera is precise. You’re not even viewing the thing through the lens anymore. You’re viewing it through this thing up on top of the lens and you have to then bring these two images together in the viewfinder in order to focus. But eventually I got comfortable with that camera and understanding that it is very unlike the view camera. It requires much more of a kind of pre-visualization and an imagining of things. Understanding the picture that you’re making even though you’re not seeing any confirmation of it. Because that plain piece of glass that is the viewfinder never changes. You just know that if this one is made at 5.6, and this is made at 22, what the difference in optical appearance is going to be. You’re not seeing it, but you know. Once I understood what a 5.6 looks like . . . If I want everything from foreground to the background to be in focus . . . you’re not going to see it through the lens but you know, at the end of the day, what that’s going to look like. But having something about the history and the present of those places that I needed to talk about helped me figure out the form. And also understanding the history of the way landscape as a genre has evolved in photography and wanting to be in conversation with that tradition. And trying to figure out how to both participate in and disrupt that tradition at the same time because you always have to add something; there has to be some disruption. You have to be saying something that needs to be said that hasn’t been said before.

AL I do think that there’s something musical and rhythmic and poetic about the landscape work. Do you think that your investment in your long history with music somehow found its way into the landscapes? I’m sure it contributed to the way you made your portraits.

AL Well, I agree with you on that. But I think that because black and white has a more reduced pallet of information, it forces the viewer to see the drawing of the landscape or the figure, and forces them to imagine more because you don’t have as much information.

DB The black and white print can be manipulated, like I printed them very dark forNight Coming Tenderly, Black to approximate nighttime or dusk, but they still have that very narrow tonal range of blacks and greys. So, it activates the viewer’s imagination in a way that is different from conventional color material.

AL Absolutely, because there’s less information. I’d like to go back to music and jazz and improvisation. What I meant was also in reference to the way you see sequence. The landscape is very musical and very improvisational and there’s a kind of unexpected rhythm. You wrote poetry when you were a kid as well, right? Have you started doing that again?

DB I can’t find any of my early poetry. But that was probably my initial expressive form. I was reading everything from Rod McKuen to Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni, and what I was writing ranged from the deeply reflective and philosophical to the political and romantic which, again, is this idea of taking experience and transforming it into something that is not a literal description but something that uses language in an evocative and expressive way that allows you to reimagine experience. I think that reimagining resonates more deeply. I can just tell you that I met a woman and fell in love, and we broke up and I feel like sh*t. Okay, you told the story. But how do you use language to make those feelings linger and resonate? So yeah, it’s interesting because as I think about it, and I’m talking to you about it, it seems like a similar idea carried out in different mediums, always with the intention of transformation, to transform experience. That aligns closely with music, jazz music in particular, which functions differently from lyrical music, because lyrics key you into what you’re supposed to feel.

It tells a little bit of the story. But with jazz and improvisational music, you do that without using explicit language, through nuance, through composition of form, through dynamics. So yeah, I guess I’ve been on this path in different ways for a long time, trying to translate experience subjectively into something on the wall or on the page in order to share that with the world. To make it meaningful. Because my assumption is that if something is meaningful for me, I should be able to find a way and a language to make it matter to someone else. And that’s the challenge of the work. Because if we didn’t want it to matter to someone else, we would just make the prints, put them in a box, and keep them in our flat files. But this act of publicly presenting the work . . .

You just came off of your huge survey show at MoMA [Between Two Rivers], a platform for transformation on a grand scale. You always hope that the work provides some kind of revelation, even as it’s supposed to be self-revealing; it’s also, hopefully, for each person that stands in front of the work, a kind of transformation. You want people to go away from the work differently than they came to it. How do you think about that?

AL I was surprised and shocked by the impactBetween Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivièreshas had on people who I don’t even know but who have written to me. And it’s great. I mean, I agree with you in that I make this work because I’d like to say something that hasn’t been said. But my intentions stop there and it’s a bit shocking to me when I realize the impact the show has had. I’m still processing; it just ended two weeks ago on March 16, 2024. During one of the tours that I gave to students and visitors, a young woman asked me, “Did you make these particular types of pictures of Vietnam because nothing like that was ever made before?” And I think that my answer was, “Well, I made these because that’s what felt right to me. And yes, I do agree that it’s true that nothing has been made like that.” But that was not really how I started. In that sense, I don’t think I would know to make something that hasn’t been made before.

DB Yeah. I think on some level, we make the work that we want to see that doesn't exist. And the only way for us to see it is to make it. And then we present it. For me, the work is never really finished or complete until it’s on the wall. So, I can stand back and see what I’ve made. As much as I can understand someone else is going to stand in front of it, because I’m curious about all of the questions of possible scale, sequencing, the architecture of the space—all of those things are going to shape the lighting, the color of the wall. I just did an interview with a writer who’s writing a piece about the fact that more and more artists are having an active conversation with curators about how they want the wall to be colored. I’ve started asking that the work be shown on walls that are painted a specific shade of black. As opposed to always showing within the white box, which gives the whole experience, for me, a different kind of lingering self-consciousness in this space of the big white box of a museum. When the walls are black, the only thing you can pay attention to are the pictures on the wall. And they become amplified in that space. I don’t know that it would work with everything, but for the work that I’m doing that requires a certain degree of quietude and contemplation, I’m finding that the work functions differently in a darkened space as opposed to a white space. Who knows? That may or may not be true for the next pictures.

AL Right.

DB That’s a making problem. It’s a completely different issue. Because the emotions don’t tell you how to make anything. They don’t tell you where to place the camera. They don’t tell you anything. They give you a reason for being there and trying to figure it out. But this idea that these landscapes are so highly charged that one cannot even go there, because of the imagined trauma that being there might evoke, is something that I’ve never felt because I’m there to do the work. To me, doing the work always goes back to that question of the four-sided, two-dimensional, optically made thing. How to shape this experience so that as much of the experience and context . . . because context is hugely important to how people read the work and how to make that resonate in the final photographic object. But if I was in a state of emotional turmoil while I was there making the work, I wouldn’t be able to make the work.

AL That’s right. And it’s also courage because it is a loaded subject and a loaded location, and you were cold-headed and you were there as a photographer. I mean, that’s what Richard always said: It’s a problem that you have to resolve when you’re standing out there trying to make a picture. And you can’t resolve anything when you are emotional.

DB It’s a problem to solve, and that’s what all the pictures are. The context and the loaded history of the landscape remain, but it’s still this problem that you have to solve. And then it’s more than a body of work you have to solve at one time; you have to solve it two times, five times, ten times. For instance, with the work on the slave trail, the challenge was even greater than it was with the plantations because there were like several plantations on that road so I could move around. And even within the one plantation, Evergreen, there’s a lot of ground to cover. But on the slave trail, that newly arrived enslaved peoples forcibly traveled, it’s just this little narrow trail. There’s not much room to move around it and makes different kinds of pictures. Even though that’s the challenge, that’s exactly what you have to do to translate this experience multiple ways so that it approximates the experience of the body in this space. Consider how a body, which is now the camera, might experience this space and then figure out multiple ways to activate that through the pictures. That trail is not even six feet wide. Probably 5 feet wide and it runs only for three miles; that’s what remains, and only about a mile and a half that I could walk. So, it’s about just reinventing picture after picture of the space, even as it gives the sense of the body moving through that space and how to reinvent the idea of that movement and space visually and how to reinvent the place through a constant shift in positionality and vantage point, and also through to the way you manipulate the optics of the lens, light, and composition to heighten the experience.

But like you said, it’s a problem to be solved. And that’s what drives the work, this desire to go some place and then subject yourself to having to figure out the problem of translation. How does one translate it from experience to object? And, for me, it probably won’t change with the next group either. This idea of black and white as a kind of sucking all of the present out of the work. I’m subjecting it to a more perceptual experience of the past. But how do you think about that? I’m just curious because you have your photographs, even in your recent show some are color, some are black and white. How do you think about the material question? Like you said, we can make them different sized; you have a lot of options.

AL When I start a project, I always think about what is the best tool for this next thing that I’m going to attempt: Should it be this or that? Should I switch to a digital camera and I actually pick it up and try to use it to make life easier for myself and to cut back on the cost? It is a practical solution, but I still think that there’s something about the way a negative describes space that is interesting to me, and a particular size, and that’s why my photographs are not huge. I switched to color forEvents Ashore because being stuck at sea on an overcast day, everything in middle gray without any contrast became too depressing and I thought, Well, if I switched to color perhaps you could have cold gray, warm gray. I consider the tool every time and I’m glad that I actually went back to black and white forFourteen Views, the recent cyclorama installation at MoMA. That was also for practical reasons. I didn’t have a lot of time to finish that project in time for the MoMA show and I knew I would have color cast issues trying to connect all the skies because skies are really, really hard to manage. But I want to talk about beauty. Some of the most telling conversations I’ve had with Vietnam vets about their experiences, in addition to talking about the horror and the devastation of fighting in combat, is that they almost always talk about how beautiful the landscape was in Vietnam. The landscape in Vietnam is extraordinary. It is something that I always carried and struggled with. How to incorporate, how not to deny the beautiful aspect of landscape—

DB I know.

AL —in pictures that are supposed to be loaded? I want to hear about how you dealt with that.

DB I’m making beautiful photographs in places where nothing beautiful ever happened. That’s the lingering profound contradiction of the work. But one of the things that I’m aware of is how beauty can be a kind of anchor to draw you into a particular conversation. How the beauty of the object can seduce one into an engagement with the place and with the subject that can make it resonate that much more deeply. I don’t know how to go to a place and make an ugly picture. I don’t know what that would be. Would that mean not framing everything up?

AL What beautiful means is that everything is square, vertical, and straight and you describe the space in a way that’s physical, right? That’s all it means, and that using the light the way that makes sense for you.

DB You must know Robert Adams’ bookOn Beauty.

ALYes, yes.

DB That was one of my most well-traveled books. I love that book. Now, even ironically, in Robert Adams’ case, I don’t quite understand all his photographs. And this is interesting because I’ve had this conversation with so many people, even with Emmet Gowin when I saw him recently, because for so many photographers working within what could be called the landscape tradition, Robert Adams is foundational for them, in a way that I’ve just never felt. I felt Robert Adams’ writing more deeply than his photographs. But this idea of beauty being a multi-layered thing is the way that I think about the work because there’s something about going to a place and translating it formally and materially into a beautiful description of a place. That’s the profound contradiction that is sometimes buried within the landscape tradition, that there is an undercurrent—

AL —of darkness.

DB Yeah. There’s an undercurrent of darkness that runs through. And this whole romantic or Emersonian notion of the landscape as sublime or—

AL —ineffable.

DB Which was just a way of setting up the conversation of manifest destiny. This supposed unpopulated expanse of American landscapes, when in fact it was of course populated by indigenous tribes. The horror that lies just beneath the surface of the landscape is always there. It’s something that I thought about when I was photographing in Louisiana, for example. Photographing in the sugarcane fields and in the section of the plantation where all the former slave cabins are. It was a beautiful day. The weather was beautiful. You go out into the field and this beautiful expanse of land is where absolute horror was visited upon the Black bodies who were forced to work there. That’s the contradiction inherent in making those kinds of photographs and the contradiction that is at the heart of the landscape tradition. So, given my history and the way I think about making pictures, I don’t know how to make photographs that don’t have a kind of visual eloquence to them. No matter what the subject. And if I wouldn’t be able to bring that to the subject, it’s probably not the subject that I would want to be photographing.

AL It’s the visual eloquence that teases out the real meaning and the undercurrent. That’s how you remind the viewer, by bringing attention to the true meaning underneath.

DB I’m not always privileged to hear or see how people respond to the work. But I’ve had two instances where I’ve unexpectedly stepped into a gallery where my work is up and there are people visiting. When the Night Coming Tenderly,Black photographs were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago—I don’t know what brought me there, maybe I was showing a friend who’d come and wanted to see this show or maybe I was walking through the show with the curator Matt Witkovsky—I got there and there were two women standing very close to and deeply engrossed in the work. And then they turned and saw me, and they were unsettled momentarily. Probably because I had done a certain amount of media, and they immediately recognized that I’m the guy that made the photograph, but it was so confusing to them because they had gotten drawn into it to the point that they were literally experiencing the history the work was about; they were inside the photograph in a way.

And one of them turned to me looking confused and said, “But you made these, right?” She was trying to reconcile my standing there with the experience they had been having moments before. She said, again, “But you made these; you made these now, right?” And I figured I better help her quick because she’s really in a very strange place. And I said, “Yes, yes. I’m the artist. I’m the photographer. I made these last year in 2021.” I said this to throw her a life raft and pull her back. It was one of the few times I’ve ever had that experience. And another time when I was showing my work at the Addison Gallery in Andover, I walked in and there were two women looking at the photographs very closely, and one of them was touching it. Then I noticed that she was crying. And I just stood back. I didn’t want to interrupt the experience that they were clearly having. So, I’ve seen just enough to know that the work works the way I hope it might be working, and even in ways I couldn’t quite anticipate.

And even if I can’t anticipate the people who stand in front of it, because we’re generally never privileged to see that because if we’re in the room and people are looking at the work, they’re very self-conscious about our presence. But those two times when I just happened to quietly step into the space, and they didn’t know I was there and they were in the midst of having a very strong reaction, was interesting to see. They were clearly having a very emotional experience.

AL Do you think that has to do with photography, especially in the first instance? Because it felt so real to her.

DB Definitely.

AL Because it’s so connected to the real world. And the way you photographed it in the darkness. All of that just added to the emotion that it must be real. The connection of photography to truth is still problematic.

DB I know. Even though that work is highly manipulated, like I made that work during the daytime and printed them—

AL It’s a day for night. I love it.

DB Yeah, I printed those negatives to have the appearances of nighttime. All of a sudden, this woman is feeling herself moving through the darkness. Her friend was with her; it was almost like they were holding hands, moving through the darkness together. And I wonder what allowed for that. I don’t think anyone stands in front of a painting and has that kind of experience, even though they feel something. But it’s not necessarily that kind of literally transporting experience.

AL And they’re true feelings. I mean, you go see a movie that is really great, and you cry. You feel those emotions, but you walk out knowing that was a film. I think photography is in a different category. But the notion of photography and truth and fiction is still confusing for people.

DB And it’s something that we’re generally never privileged to see as it’s happening for the viewer. We just hope that if we bring everything that we know to the subject, and if we’re deeply invested in the subject, and the telling of the subject, we have to trust that that’s translating to the viewer. And, of course, for me, scale. Scale has a good deal to do with that as well. With a large photograph—it’s less object driven in the way a small photograph would be—

if you stand close enough to a large photograph, it blocks out everything in your peripheral vision and you’re inside its space. Which is why I make them the size that I do, because I do want them to be more experiential and less object driven. You know 11x14, it’s clearly a photograph.

AL It’s a more intimate experience. But yes, you can walk into a larger photograph.

DB I think with a small print, if you try hard enough, maybe you can do that. Maybe even a book, but it’s different when you have this large object photograph in front of you. If you stand close enough to it, that’s the only visual experience that you’re having. This idea of scale has certainly, for a lot of us who make photographs, become increasingly meaningful given that they can be made in any size from 4x5 inches to 11x14, 16x20, 20x24, 30x40, 50x60. When I talk to students about the fact that we’ve now arrived at a place where photographs can be any size, the question of intentionality becomes even more—

AL What’s the right size? I also love hearing thatthat woman was with a friend: That aspect, of experiencing a photograph communally, is something I hadn’t thought of before. And if your picture is too small, only one person can see it at the time. Here, she’s actually able to experience it with someone else and that’s something that has been of interest to me lately. But yeah, size does matter.

Session 2 (March 26, 2024)

ALWe had started by talking about how getting to know Roy DeCarava’s work made you understand what it meant to be an art photographer and understanding the distinction between photojournalism and art photography.

DBSpecifically, as a Black photographer. The culturally specific piece is very important.

AL Can you expand on that?

DB Well, certainly for me, and for a lot of us who aspire to be artists working in photography who were also Black, Roy was a singular presence in that space because he was making photographs, not all of them, but most of them, from inside the culture. But the way in which he was doing that was through a highly idiosyncratic, formal, and material language for photography. It wasn’t documentary, it wasn’t photojournalism; it was using the camera as an expressive tool. And also using the camera to talk about African American culture, the Black presence. And wanting to use the medium in an ambitious way, and to place the Black subject inside of that. That became the challenge for all of us, to do that in our own way, with Roy as an almost singular example of what that might look like through his work. Not to emulate his work, but to realize that one could engage in photography as an expressive form. That one could engage the full history of the making of photography as art objects and center that activity around the Black subject.

AL So, he was a real trailblazer.

DB For the Black community. But to do that in a way that was ambitious in terms of the picture. It’s all about the picture, it’s always there.

AL It seems to me that he happened to be speaking about the Black community because that's what was closest, that’s where he comes from, and that’s what he knows well, but it could have been anything else. I want to know more about that importance of the Black subject. Because I’ve had students and young Asian women come up to me saying something similar. And for me, the hard part was always the art part, the handling of the medium and the ambition for the medium. And with the subject matter, I had to come around to it and pushed to it at Yale. It’s challenging, but I want to hear what you have to say about the challenges and the rewards of working with the subject that perhaps were not as prevalent.

DB Well, let me back up because I really want to clarify what Roy meant to us. Because Roy being the first Black photographer to get a Guggenheim and, for a long time, the only Black photographer to get a Guggenheim and to be participating in the arena in which we wanted to participate, to be collected and exhibited in museums—

AL Right. In the mainstream.

DB That a Black photographer could achieve that while still working from inside of the culture . . . He was a huge affirmation for those of us who saw no other evidence other than Roy that we might participate in this at the level, and for a long time that remained true. I imagine for younger, Black artists now, I probably exemplify that myself.

AL Yeah, absolutely.

DB Which is why so many of them keep in touch with me, reach out to me. Because I’m doing the thing that they want to do. My presence embodies the possibility—

AL The potential for that.

DB Like Roy did for me: Maybe you can do this, too. Maybe you can show your work in museums. Maybe you can get books published. Maybe you can do all the things I’m now doing. Maybe you too, like Roy and me, can work from inside the culture and end up getting a Guggenheim. And if you’re persistent and keep raising the bar, maybe you too have the possibility of getting a MacArthur Fellowship. All these things that I’ve done. I understand how I inspire the generation coming up behind me, much like the way DeCarava’s singular presence did for me and for so many other young Black photographers. Doing this thing that we imagined ourselves doing that he affirmed we could do. And not just because we were working from inside the culture, but because we were making rigorous work too. We clearly knew the history of the medium and we were using all of the lessons of that history and bringing that to our subjects. So, I can’t over emphasize what a singular presence he was for so many of us. He was very tough, but he let us know that he was available and that if he had any work we wanted to show him, he’d be happy to look at it. He would make you cry when he started critiquing it. He was tough but available.

AL Was it constructive?

DB Oh, definitely. You had to go away and let your behind heal a little bit after the lesson because he wasvery direct. And obviously, he was supportive because he made himself available in ways he didn't even have to do.

ALThis is in addition to his teaching responsibilities and his commercial work.

DB Yeah, so, Roy has remained at the top of my list of influences, the affirmation that in fact I could do this thing. That there was a precedent for what I wanted to do, and he was that precedent. He wasn't photographing forLife Magazine. I didn’t want to work forLife Magazineanyway, I just wanted to do my work. Whatever in that idealistic, young sense, he seemed to be doing it.

AL I think something that I know both you and I believe in is the magic of photography. We love it, and we’re out there behind the camera, whether it’s a digital camera or a view camera or a handheld. When you start working, the pleasure that you get is just unequal. Then it makes up for the quality of work, the research that we had to put in to get there. Being behind the camera is just pure pleasure for me.

DB You have to love the medium. That’s a very old-fashioned way of thinking and talking about it, but you have to love going out into the world and making pictures and fully embracing the expressive possibility of that.

AL And being open to the surprises that happen, the unexpected. And being ready to just deal with that. I have a two-prong question. I want to talk about the difference between documenting something as a photojournalist and making your own work. I think that when I first saw the pictures that you made of David Hammons’ performance or street actions or events. I could feel the pleasure and the excitement in the making of the picture. Because there was always something surprising. It’s hard because there’s not much room for authorship, unless you photograph the behind the scenes. But here, while the main event is David’s performance, there’s something about the way you photograph the world that is beyond just documenting. I could feel the surprise that you discovered as you were photographing and experiencing the moment. And then, your handling of the medium, which is about apprehending the capture and the transformation of the moment.

DB When I met David, I was in the midst of theHarlem U.S.A. photographs [1975-79] so he knew about the kind of photography I made. And we were friends, with many other artist friends in common. And given that almost all of the work that he was doing was in the streets, whether it was making the bottle trees in Harlem, or the performances like Bliz-aard Ball Sale, I had a real familiarity with making things in the unstructured environment of the street appear visually coherent.

ALRight.

DB They are very ephemeral, meant to last only so long, and to be only seen by whoever happened to be passing by in that moment. So, it was shortly into our relationship where I started getting these late-night phone calls from David. He’d say, “I’m gonna be at Cooper Square, two o’clock; why don’t you come?” And I understood what he meant. “Why don’t you come?” and “Do what you do” but do it with me. He never had to spell it out because I was going to make what he was doing as interesting, photographically, as I could. But there was always a clear distinction between the work that I was doing with David and the more, what you will call, expressive work that I was doing for myself. Of course, I tried to bring some of that to the way in which I photographed whatever he was doing. But for a long time, out of respect for David, I just made up some 8x10s, after we had our engagement, and I gave them to him and I just went on about my business. I didn’t feel it was my place to show them, exhibit them, because they were photographs of his performance work. But as time went on, and as David became more central to the contemporary art conversation about performance work and about work that is made or exists outside of the box, I realized at some point that there needs to be a more public visualization of that work, for the sake of history if nothing else.

AL Right.

DB That this work that he did, that is now so important, needed to be seen. So, the first time I showed that work was at the Frieze art fair in 2019. I had a whole booth of my David Hammons work. And that was because that section of Frieze had been organized as a tribute to Just Above Midtown (JAM) Gallery. David and I had met initially at Studio Museum in Harlem. We were both equally connected, but David even more so, to Just Above Midtown Gallery. So, I figured that occasion would be the right occasion because it was about Just Above Midtown Gallery. David was a part of that community, and I was a part of that community. So, I went ahead and did some really nice exhibition prints and came up with a way to install that work that alluded to its dynamic performative form rather than just putting them individually on the wall in a straight line. I came up with an installation for the work. But the question of the dual authorship of that work, they’re my photographs of David’s performances.

AL I feel that it was a collaboration.

DB It was.

AL Because there’s a lightness to the way you captured the moment. The ephemeral quality is there. The wit and the mischievousness are just so present. And the pictures are smart, and you allowed the event to fill up the frame.

DB He never gave me any instruction. I showed up with my camera and made the work.

AL There was a real trust.

DB I didn’t have that kind of relationship with any other artist, not really. That was a very singular relationship, making work with David. Although I also did freelance work photographing art and art objects for MoMA and Studio Museum in Harlem. That was different, that was clearly a job.

AL Right. It was like product photography.

DB I knew what to do, but it was different. It was for the publication. It wasn’t going to be exhibited. But my work with David was a very singular kind of relationship.

AL Did you guys talk about art or your own work or the way things were developing?

DB Sure. David was a very liberating presence. He was the embodiment of what it meant to be free as an artist. He showed us that you don’t have to follow the orthodoxy, the tradition. He would always ask me, Why don’t you loosen up, Dawoud? Why don’t you loosen up and just make the picture? And I said, “That’s not what I do, David; that’s you. I have a whole way of thinking about this and that’s why these pictures I make of you look as formally coherent as they do because that’s what I do.” But David, for all of us, in a pretty much singular way, was a liberating influence—less so for me, but for the painters and other younger artists that I knew—because David didn’t believe that you needed to go to Pearl Paint to make your work.(laughter) He’d ask, Why is everybody giving their money to Pearl Paint? If you went to Pearl Paint, one of the things that you’d hope for was to not see David. Sometimes he would be standing out front of Pearl Paint to just look at you and make you feel foolish that you don’t have a lot of money and you just gave these people your money so you can make art. He resented that. You would come out of Pearl Paint, look around, and sometimes he would literally be across the street, watching you with your bags after you just gave Pearl Paint a few hundred dollars.

AL So, he felt Pearl Paint was a security blanket, right? And you should jettison everything and start with everyday materials?

DBCorrect.

AL Even though, like you said, he’s relaxed, there’s still rigor to everything he does.

DB David didn’t believe in the conventions of either making or presentation, and he encouraged all of us to not believe in that, and instead to loosen it up a little bit. Don’t feel like you have to go buy art supplies to make art—the art is you. And that can be articulated without giving Pearl Paint a few hundred dollars that, at that time, none of us had. David didn’t have any money. I mean, none of us had any money. Pearl Paint was basically where everybody went back in the day. And David’s thing was that that shouldn’t matter. I don’t know what you call that, but the position he occupied was a singular conceptual/moral position.

AL He was so iconoclastic. But again, like you said, everything has a tradition.

DB And I was always conscious of working out of a tradition. For example, there was a tradition that came with the small camera. I could recite that tradition from the beginning, from the Ermanox to the Leica to Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, and Garry Winogrand.

AL I love what you said about how inHarlem, USA, the first portraits you made, with a handheld camera, look like 4x5s because that’s the kind of work you’d been looking at from Avedon and Irving Penn. So, you had put your hand-held camera on a tripod thus giving those very spontaneous pictures a more seated and presentational feel.

DB I was hand using the 35mm camera very precisely when I was initially photographing in Harlem, making these very still pictures with the small camera because the traditional relationship of tool to a certain kind of picture hadn’t taken hold yet. So, I wasn’t even thinking about it. I was thinking about making pictures that in some ways were similar to the pictures that I liked, like Walker Evans. Walker Evans was making those pictures with a camera on a tripod. But I didn’t know what he was making them with; I just wanted to make something like that.

AL That feel, yeah.

AL And to your landscapes.

DB Right. And the Street Portraits, too. And that’s when I started using the 4x5 camera in 1988, when I recognized that the optics and the size of the camera, and all of that, gave you a different kind of photograph.

AL Also, I think that the subjects respond to you differently because of your camera. You’re standing next to the camera; you don’t have the camera in your face as you’re working with them.

Let’s talk about your relationship to the subject. Susan Kismaric, whom we all met at Yale, has written a lot about portraiture and she says that the dynamics between the subject and the photographer can be very uneven. But when it’s matched, where the subject trusts the photographer and the photographer is willing to give over a certain amount of control to the subject, there’s a wonderful synergy that happens and that’s what happens in a lot of your work. You allow the subject to be themselves. As viewers, we are privy to that relationship. Would you talk about how that happens and what it does to the meaning of a portrait that is successful in that way for you?

DB There are those street portrait photographs, part of the informality of them has to do with the fact that they’re made in the informal environment of the street. Because the truth is that none of the people in those pictures were standing exactly where they were standing until I asked them, “Why don’t you stand here?” Like if I was on the side of the street in bright sunlight, and I knew that I needed that even light of open shade, I would engage them, ask them if I could make a picture with them. And of course, the most difficult thing—it was never difficult for me—is gaining the subject’s trust. People instinctively know if your interest in them is genuine. Once I have that, then I can say, “Why don’t you come across the street with me for a minute? I think we can make a good picture over here.” I’m not telling them come across the street because I need open shade and this is too bright. I’m just like, Why don’t you come across the street with me for a minute—how much time do you have? Okay, let’s make a picture. But most of the time, those photographs, without revealing my hand too much, really are directed. I would see somebody go into a store and I would look at the front of the store and realize that I could make an interesting picture with them when they came out. If I didn’t act too excited when they came out.(laughter) I would just stand as if I was waiting for whatever and the person would come out and I’d say, “Hi! How you doing?” And because the camera was so conspicuous, they immediately knew that I was making photographs with this big camera and that my stopping them probably had something to do with that.

The portraits are very formal in their construction, but they’re informal in their circ*mstances. And they’re really driven by my fundamental interest in the human community, in wanting to see the Black subject represented and presented to the world in a certain kind of photograph. It became an arena for their own directed self-performance because it was also about shaping their behavior and their body to the space of the frame. You know, elbows and arms, everything has to fit within that immovable frame that doesn’t change shape. And I’m thinking all of that. But first it’s about really gaining the trust of the individual. Occasionally, somebody would say, “No,” and I would say, “Fine. Have a nice day. You take care.” No big thing. But it was based on these subjects’ perception that I was genuinely interested in them. It’s a deep momentary interest in them. I don’t need to know how many siblings they have; I don’t need to know what your birthday is. I don’t want to be their best friend. I don’t need their phone number. It’s not that kind of interest, but a very deep momentary interest that lasts as long as it takes for us to do this thing that we’re about to do.

AL I want to hear more about that deep momentary connection you’re talking about, bringing attention to the community and expanding this continuum, and it’s true all the pictures do that. Maybe I’m asking this question for the benefit of young photographers, but that’s a broad idea and photography is about specificity. So, what are the sparks? Can you remember specific portraits you’ve made where there was some kind of evidentiary marker that drew your attention and that’s what you went for? I don’t think people talk about that.

DB Okay. The photographs that I could most directly point to in my earliest development that related to that work were three exhibitions I saw. I saw Mike Disfarmer’s first. His work was included in a group show from MoMA’s collection. And even though Disfarmer was in the studio, those people are clearly directed, probably not as directed as I directed people but they were directed. But something about this ordinary person standing in front of the camera and the way their presence was amplified spoke to an innate sensibility that I had about the world. And then that was reinforced when I went to see the Irving Penn show at Marlborough. In the front, they have the giant cigarette butts. I didn’t want to go around in the street picking up trash and getting close to it. I thought they were fascinating, and in the back were the Small Trades pictures. That’s what I remember. Again, ordinary people, just standing there. But they weren’t just standing there; there was something else happening and that came from Penn’s deep momentary attention to them. And given their almost ceremonial ability to present themselves to the camera, which is outside of the experience of most people. And then I went back and saw the Avedon portraits. And that’s when it began to really dawn on me that this idea of taking ordinary people and putting them in front of the camera could result in something meaningful. I just had to figure out where to go to do that myself. So, it started with the Harlem pictures in the ’70s, and then in the ’80s continued with the street portraits, initially in my own neighborhood. Because eventually I decided I wanted a different appearance in the photograph, that more sustained appearance that comes from working with a large camera on a tripod. But those are my precedents for that work. And then, of course, there were others. Probably the first photograph that I saw that I wanted to make something like it—I wrote about this photograph inPhotograph magazine a few years ago—is Walker Evans’ photograph of a Black woman called Sixth Avenue.She had a fur around her shoulders.

AL And a hat.

DB Yeah. And she’s looking right at the lens, so Evans must have stopped her and engaged her. Even before I really knew what I was looking at, I knew I wanted to make pictures like that. To have all of the world going on around her, but at the center of it was this stillness, this relationship between her and Walker Evans that couldn’t have lasted but, if it lasted fiveminutes, that was a lot. But he managed to slow things down long enough and gain her trust. Which in Evans’ case, giving that she’s a Black woman and he’s a white photographer, there could have been an immediate distrust. But somehow, he gained her trust enough for this picture to result. And I probably saw that picture for the first time maybe in 1976 or so when I was starting out. But that picture, I never forgot it. And just a few years ago, I got the opportunity to write about it. And I talked about what that picture meant to me. So, there were pictures that I saw that signaled to me what my ambitions might be. And then a lot of others that I just came to know because I love photography. I was looking at everything, which is why I have this huge library of books of everything from Evans to Sally Mann and I have them all in front of me. Going back to your earlier point about this love of photography, for me, the work was always about two things: The medium and the history. And then, the all-important question of one subject.

AL You quoted Avedon saying, “My photographs don’t go below the surface. They don’t go below anything. They’re readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.” So, you can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface? It’s all about describing the surface. And like you said, describing the arm, the gesture, the physicality of the person, what they’re wearing, the light on their face. And hopefully with that, you can get to something deeper about themselves. I love that quote that you excerpted.

DB I was always interested in the thing that gives the work, especially the street portrait photographs, the kind of power that they have. And it’s true of a lot of my portraits give the person in front of the camera a sense of interiority. There is something beyond the surface, suggesting that complicated something through their performance towards the camera. This is an interior complex person, not a social type. This complexity is the thing that allows people who don’t know the individuals in the photographs, or people like the people in the photographs, a sense of human complexity and interiority that we all share. This is what I think people identify with in the portraits that I’ve made. Whether it was a young Black girl, an older Black man, it doesn’t matter. There’s a sense to looking at a human being. And for me, the work became a way to bring the human community into a conversation with itself, across those lines of presumed differences. Like this person lives in a neighborhood nothing like yours, they’re coming from a different culture, they’re a different age and yet, you look at it and you feel some connectedness to this person.

AL It’s interesting that you start with the outside description—the skin, what they wear—but then you connect with their vulnerability. You connect with their pride or their strength or their resilience. All those things that are suggested.

DB The things that make us human.

AL And that’s an incredible gift.

DB I’ve always been aware that, in making portraits, most of us reveal things in our face that we’re not even aware of. That’s just a fact. The way we look at each other when we’re talking, the way you look like this when I say something. We’re revealing things about the experience that we’re having that we’re not even necessarily aware of. The face becomes the reflection of those interior responses.And I’m aware of that and I’m aware of how to both direct and not disrupt that too much. The thing is to do that and to stay out of my own way because I don’t want the self-consciousness of the moment.

AL Right. It could get contrived very easily.

DB Yeah. If the photographs are doing what they should do, I and the camera kind of disappear. Once I’ve answered all of the questions that I had about making those kinds of photographs, I have to ask myself another question.

AL What’s unfinished? The questions that you didn’t get answers for.

DB What’s the next question? And the next? The next photographs should be a response to that.

AL After forty, fifty years of work, you can step back and see how all the questions, answers, and ideas jump back and forth into a continuum. It’s comforting to see that you’ve been having this big discussion in your head and everything’s bouncing around, but it’s all connected and enlightening each other. It’s somehow moving the whole train forward. It’s one of the rewards of having worked for so long.

DB Roy DeCarava said, “You should be able to look at me and see my work.” And then he said, “You should be able to look at my work and see me.” I think that’s part of what you’re talking about, this connective thread that runs through all of the work over decades. Which has to do with the fact that I made all of them and I’m still fundamentally the same person, sensibility wise, commitment-wise, social commitment wise. I’m also deeply engaged in finding ways through my chosen medium to talk about these things. Because even with the Street Portraits work andHarlem U.S.A.,I’m talking about a place.

AL Harlem, and then the amplification of Harlem into the larger world, yeah.

DB Exactly. And the environment itself that the Street Portraits were made in was always a part of the narrative of the work. What I really wanted to foreground was the individual in that place. So, how do you foreground the individual in space? Well, that’s an optical question. If you’re making a picture at F16 11 22, everything’s going to be emphasized. If you make the picture, as I made all of the Street Portraits, at 5.6 and a half, maybe 8, the person in the photograph is pushed into the foreground. The viewer doesn’t know why that happens, but that’s why. And that’s the problem-solving thing. What am I trying to do and how do I make that happen? So, this idea of using the lens in such a way that the manipulation of the foreground, middle ground, background privileges the foreground and allows the subject to occupy that space, that then makes it feel like they’re almost pushing into your space. Even as much as this momentary deep commitment and interest in the person, there’s that picture making thing that’s always there. That is just as important to me as the larger narrative of the work, which has to do with situating the Black subject within this conversation around representation, portraits, and the history of photography. How I can choose to represent subjects who have been misrepresented? How I can I, fundamentally, convey Black humanity?

AL After working for so many years, how do you feel about that notion of who has the right or who is entitled to photograph what? This is a discussion that happens a lot in graduate school these days.

DB The climate that I’m working in, the field itself, is very different from what it was when I started making work.And certainly, that’s been a direct consequence of constant pressure being put on the field to open itself up to voices that were once pretty much exclusively excluded, both in terms of artists making work and art historians coming into the field. Take, for example, Deborah Willis, who has expanded everyone’s sense of the history of Black participation in the making of all kinds of photographs and inspired these photo-based artists like me and Carrie Mae [Weems] and other younger Black artists who have come into the field. It’s much like the way I was inspired to come into the field by Roy’s singular presence. So, it’s a very different climate, and institutions are certainly more receptive now than they were four or five decades ago to both the presence of Black artists in those institutional spaces and the representation of Black subjects in the work in those institutional spaces. Even if you look at the recently opened Harlem Renaissance exhibition and Transatlantic Modernism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which happened once the Metropolitan Museum hired an African American curator as a major reset of the omissions that that institution and other institutions have been guilty of for a long time.

The field is changing because initially—and this is what was so important to my own formation—before any of that access existed, pretty much all we had was each other, which is why the rapport and the conversations within my larger community in the Studio Museum in Harlem and a very broad community of Black artists was so important. There were few photographers, the ones that I was closest to were Jules Allen, Frank Stewart, and then Carrie Mae when she was in New York. And then some of the Kamoinge photographers, and Deborah Willis was an early and constant presence as well, but also I spent a lot of time looking at and talking with and going to the studios of the older painters that I met. Painters like Ed Clark, William T. Williams, Jack Whitten, and Mel Edwards the sculptor. I was deeply interested in all of it. In addition to Roy DeCarava, those were my role models of what it meant to be Black and to be an artist and how to be viable in this. I don’t know that the community of young artists coming up now is as diverse in terms of the exchanges they’re having. I was hanging out with the poets and dancers like Patricia Spears Jones, Esther Louise, Audre Lorde, Sekou Sundiata, and Mervyn Taylor and dancers like Dianna McIntyre, Otis Sallid, and Rod Rodgers.

AL And musicians.

DB I first heard David Murray perform at the Studio Museum in Harlem, probably around 1976, 1977, when he first came from the Bay area in California. And David has continued to be an inspiration. He’s clearly steeped and deeply rooted in the history of Black musical expression, but he’s always forward-looking in a way that any number of more conservative or less visionary and ambitious musicians haven’t been. That’s something that I always look for, in whatever medium. It can be music, sculpture, or painting. Right now, the most ongoing conversations that I have are not with photographers and haven’t been for a very long time. Torkwase Dyson, the painter and sculptor, I talk to her more than I talk to almost anyone. I’ve found that the conversation for photographers is very often limited to a conversation about the subject, about content, instead of materiality, scale, object—all of the things the sculptors and painters know the work is about. You’re not just taking a picture and deciding what size to print it. Which was never for me an interesting conversation. It presumes that if the subject is interesting and you point a camera at it, maybe that’ll be interesting, too. (laughter) That’s not what we do.

For more deeply engaging conversations, I’ve always looked to other artists, like the painters who literally start from nothing and have to fill that space up with something of their own invention. With photographers there’s the world out there, and we reinvent the way in which we shape and engage that physical world, materially and optically, not merely recording it. That way of thinking is much more interesting to me than the way that a lot of people think and talk about photography. So, I’ve been both informed and inspired by a very broad range of artists. The first artist I started seriously showing my work to was a painter who was also a poet, LeRoy Clark. He was one of the very first artists in residence at the Studio Museum. He’s the one who told me, “Well, look what happens when you crop the bottom—do you notice how the foreground becomes even more emphasized?” And I was amazed to talk to about this with a painter. I would spend hours with him.

AL All these things that painters notice right away.

DB So, I continue to be richly informed by some of what the younger musicians like Immanuel Wilkins, Joel Ross, and Lakecia Benjamin are doing. And Jason Moran continues to be a particularly inspired presence with the history-based music projects he’s been doing around Thelonious Monk, James Reese Europe, and Duke Ellington. Whenever I’m in New York, you can find me in one of the jazz clubs.

AL My husband, John [Pilson], said that he wished he’d gone with you that night when you invited him.

DB Those are my thinking rooms: The Village Vanguard and Smoke, Dizzy’s on the Upper West Side in New York City; the Jazz Showcase, Constellation, and Elastic Arts here in Chicago; and Snug Harbor in New Orleans. These clubs are where I do my thinking.

AL Well, your recent films, includingEvergreen, 9.15.63. and350,000, allowed you to collaborate with musicians. That must have been really rewarding to work on.

DB It was. Putting together a film crew, when it works well, is a real pleasure. I’ve been fortunate, especially with the last two film crews, it felt like being back in a band again. That’s the only analogy that I could come up with. I haven’t been in a band in a long time. But being with a film crew, with good people making something, who are operating at the top of their craft, to realize this vision of mine—it’s been wonderful. And then to also collaborate with other vocalists and musicians, like Imani Uzuri onEvergreen, or for the last piece I collaborated with dancer Gaynell Sherrod to create the sonic landscape of a soundtrack for the two-channel film work350,000. And again, the sonic piece of it is important to me but it certainly, in relation to the moving image, is a way of amplifying and shifting and clarifying and expanding the meaning and dimensionality of what we’re looking at through the soundtrack. The first collaboration with sound was with my son Ramon [Alvarez-Smikle] when I made the split screen film work9.15.63 in Birmingham with him contributing the electronic music soundscape. I’m really looking forward to continuing working with the moving image.

AL Is that a difficult transition? This idea of going from still to the moving image and its wider possibilities?

DB Well, the first video piece that I made was in 2002,Four Stories. I created that with four high school students in Detroit when I was also making some of the Class Pictures work there for an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. I had already made some portraits of them with my 4x5. And I wanted something more than what the still photographs and text work alone could give. So, I decided to make a video piece with these four Detroit students, and it was the first time that I was going to be making work when I wasn’t the one looking through the camera. It felt very strange because the images were quite close on their faces, and it pans across the surface of their faces very slowly. And I thought, Oh, I can do this. I can just take the camera and move the tripod handle, right? So, I tried it and all of the jittery movement was horrible . . . it required someone else to do it, someone who was trained in doing that. That was the first time that I realized that I needed to give up—

AL Have a DP.(laughter)

DB Yeah. And a camera operator. I needed to have someone else doing that. And then, for the last two film works, I’ve been working with the same director of photography, Bron Moyi. He’s a young filmmaker out of New Orleans who’s now living in Los Angeles. I met Bron when I got the International Center of Photography Infinity Award a few years ago. They do a short film on each recipient to show before they announce and give the award. I was working in Louisiana at the time. And so they found Bron, who was also living in Louisiana at the time. He trailed me for a couple of days, filming me at the plantations, and when I saw the short film that he made, I knew I wanted to work with him.

It was beautiful because it wasn’t just me he was filming. He put the camera down low to get the movement of the grass. I was the subject, but it was richly atmospheric. So, when I started preparing to work on theEvergreen film, I asked Bron if he would be my director of photography and put together a crew to shoot that. And it turned out to be difficult because it was right at the moment of the pandemic. I like to be there with the DP, but we ended up having to do a lot of it remotely. At the time, my filmmaker friends were telling me that the whole film industry had gone remote.

ALAbsolutely. I just heard about some film where the director was in a trailer by himself away from the crew and communicating remotely.

DB That was a little bump in the road. But when he sent me the footage, I knew what I wanted this thing to look like, because you’re still dealing with the four-sided rectangular frame. So, it’s not a completely foreign space to me.

AL Right. You had made the photographs already.

DB And I knew the place. I knew the subject. I knew that landscape, and I knew what I wanted the moving images to look like; I just needed them to come alive. So, when he was photographing in the sugarcane field, I would just message to say, “Bring the camera up another few inches,” and “Get the tip of the tops of them, don’t cut them more.”

AL Right. It’s very immersive. It’s very powerful.

DB I’ve really started enjoying this process of filmmaking and working with a good crew to make something. And then to work with a great sound designer and engineer in the making of the soundtrack. I haven’t been much for collaboration in the past, but film requires that you collaborate.

AL And with a huge crew. Yes.

DB I prefer to be out by myself. When people have asked me in the past to collaborate, I didn’t even know what to say.

AL But like you said, you worked in a band before, and you used to have a bunch of kids in your mom's house.

DB Making film has taught me how to collaborate out of necessity. And also to take advantage of the extensive experience and ideas that people who are working in that area have. Because the last two-channel piece I made,350,000, I had an idea of what I wanted it to look like optically and I described this to the producer, Jordan Roderick. He said, “Oh! I know what lens you need. There’s a lens that was originally made in 1840, a Petzval lens.” It’s called a Bokeh lens. Jordan is totally geeky in his knowledge of film history and what lenses were used to make certain films. The day he brought that lens on set the entire crew was like hanging around waiting for him to open this box. And it was a lens that in silent films had been used for filming dream sequences, when things are slightly out of focus.

AL Wow. Right.

DB But I was going to use it for the entire film. And he found this lens that has a depth of field that you can manipulate, just a few inches, because it was meant to be dreamlike. But to work with somebody who knew how to translate this visual idea I had with a very particular lens made long ago . . . There’s something wonderful about engaging in a process with folks who are knowledgeable in that way. Bron has now been the DP for my last two projects, and also put the crew together or found me the director who assembled the crew. I plan to keep working with him; we work well together.

AL We used to do everything ourselves. We used to make our dark room prints, and it was hard for me to imagine ever relinquishing that to someone else. And then, I had to close my dark room a while back and had someone else print. I think being able to find people who do something well and trusting them, or being able to express what you really need, allows you to focus on something else and think more ambitiously.

DB Yeah. It’s still our work. We’re still the final judge of whether that looks like what it’s supposed to look like. At the end of the day, nobody else really knows what it’s supposed to look like. That’s all in our heads.

ALIt helped that we made the early versions and that kind of defined the way things should look. I still believe in what Richard taught us in that it’s important to get dirty, make things with your hands, and not think so much. Or think first, make, and then think again.

DB Benson was very much about the hands-on piece of it. But at some point, even he had to relinquish some of that to the press man. You could do everything, but the end result won’t necessarily be the best result.

AL But then he was on press breathing down our neck.(laughter)

DB No, but I think it’s the same. We might not be running the machines, the printers are making these giant prints, but they’re being made under our eyes. And if they’re not what they should be, we know what needs to be done. But everyone else is just making something. We’re the ones imaginingto make it materially tangible. For my last two books,Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems In Conversation andElegy, I’ve worked with a legendary designer, Eileen Boxer, who’s been on press for both books. Her knowledge of offset tri-tone printing is extensive, and I’ve really relied on her for translating the photographs into images in ink on the printed page. She’s been great to work with!

AL Can we take a little detour and go back to Linda Goode Bryant’s JAM Gallery? I’d love to hear about how you met Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger and other artists at the gallery. And I’d like to learn more about your relationship and friendship with them back then. How did it start and what did it meant to you?

DB Just Above Midtown. It’s interesting because all of the communities that I ultimately became a part of were centered on these particular institutions. JAM and Studio Museum in Harlem shared a community, or the SMH community was also a part of the community that existed at Just Above Midtown. The difference being, I guess Studio Museum’s subtitle could have been, The Museum of Late Black Modernism. They were definitely coming out of a particular modernist tradition. Just Above Midtown with David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Houston Conwill, and the other artists centered there came from Los Angeles, and they didn’t subscribe to the dictates of late modernism, Black or otherwise. They had come out of ritual, Noah Purifoy, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, and a different set of references and experiences. And so, Just Above Midtown became a place to expand your thinking, conceptually, about what art was. I remember—and I was talking to him about this not too long ago—Randy Williams had a piece at JAM calledHomage to the Corner of a Wall.And it was just this small piece sitting at eye level literally placed in the corner of the wall. You would not have seen that at Studio Museum in Harlem.

Eventually, because of the influence of David [Hammons] and Senga Nengudi, and those artists, Studio Museum in Harlem began to take on a more expansive definition as well. But at that point, the work that was being shown at Just Above Midtown, although it did have something in common with Studio Museum in Harlem, was a more boundary-stretching place. We all hung out in both. David Hammons was artist in residence at Studio Museum in Harlem, even as he was very much a part of the foundational community at Just Above Midtown. Maren Hassinger also became an artist in residence at Studio Museum. So, for me, Just Above Midtown became a place to understand that art could exist outside of boundary and tradition. And of course, if you talk about art from Los Angeles, there actually is a tradition of that kind of work, but it wasn’t what we knew in New York. It was very unlike New York. David, Senga, and Maren, coming from Los Angeles, reshaped and expanded the conversation Black artists were having in New York. Both David and Maren moved to New York early on. Senga never did, so I only met her later. JAM was a very important institution and community because it was yet another place where we could periodically gather. Everyone needs a place to gather; community doesn’t form on a street corner somewhere. You need a place. Studio Museum was that, Just Above Midtown became that. The first institution that I ever started spending time at, while I was photographing in Harlem, was a place called The Weusi Gallery on 132nd Street. And 132nd Street was one of my favorite blocks to photograph on when I was photographing in Harlem in the 1970s. They would have block parties. I liked that block.

AL Not Winogrand’s Fifth Avenue, but you had your own block.

DB Exactly. There was always something going on on that block. So, I always made sure to circle back to 132nd Street. And one day, there was someone standing out front of a building, and I came to know him. Okoe Pyatt. And he said, “You’re a photographer, right? Why don’t you come inside and see what we’re doing?” I said, “Whatare you doing?” He said, “Oh, this is the Weusi Gallery.” We went up the steps and inside, and he showed me around. They had small studios in the back. I met some of the Weusi artists, including Abdullah Aziz, Ademola Olugebefola, and became friends with them. They were working out of a very quasi-African informed, Black nationalist kind of space. The whole Black modernism thing was not their space. They were working out of a tradition that they saw as extending the tradition of African art into the African American moment. But they were the first artists that I came to know.

If I was on 132nd Street, I would just go up the steps to Weusi Gallery, see what was going on. So, between Weusi Gallery, Studio Museum, Just Above Midtown, Cinque, which had been formed by artists Ernest Crichlow, Norman Lewis, and Romare Bearden, Benin Gallery in Harlem, started by photographer Ed Sherman and artist G. Falcon Beazer, we had all these different little clubhouses that we could come together in and see each other’s work, talk about work, hang out after and continue the conversation, and maybe eventually mount an exhibition, which I did at Benin and Cinque. Certainly, for me, as a young artist, this was hugely important because I grew up in Queens. And with the exception of the Store Front Museum—which had been started by artist Tom Lloyd, and led me to Milford Graves and deeper into music, since Milford was teaching there—those kinds of institutions didn’t exist. Jamaica Arts Center ultimately came along years later, and I both taught and exhibited there. But it was about finding the places where you could locate your community and maybe at some point show your work. Or, at the very least, you were going to get to see the work of someone that you knew, that you could have a conversation with. At the Studio Museum, it was mostly the older artists, like Mel Edwards, Sam Gilliam, William T. Williams, Ed Clark, Jack Whitten. Those are the ones who were showing there. Those are the ones I gravitated towards early on, and they became my friends and mentors and my role models, if you want to call them that.

AL The Studio Museum is still very active and expanding with a new building. What do you think of the young generation of Black artists today and the community that they have created. Do you think that they have expanded the community that you guys started? Or have they created their own community?

DB It’s different for them, but the centrality of Studio Museum in Harlem to the conversation—

AL —is very strong. Yeah.

DB It’s just absolutely extraordinary. And the way that the Studio Museum, has, through successive leadership, continued to build that institution. Because the big change came when Studio Museum in Harlem decided to become an accredited museum. That was under the direction of Mary Schmidt Campbell and Kinshasha Holman Conwill. They became an accredited museum, through the American Association of Museums, like all other professional museums in this country. The interesting thing is that the artist-in-residence part of the institution was the idea of painter, William T. Williams.

AL Wow.

DB For a studio, specifically a studio museum . . . people now just say Studio Museum in Harlem without realizing that at that point, the emphasis was on studio. That it was going to be a museum where Black artists can have a studio and interact with the public. But the fact that an artist had that idea. I have all the respect in the world for William T. Williams as an artist, but also as the one to conceptualize that. And then, Mel Edwards came in and began to help William T. clean the space up—the upstairs space at 2033 Fifth Avenue—to make it ready for studios. So that institution has an extraordinary history that Thelma Golden . . . Thelma Golden had experience at the Whitney.

Thelma brought her history to Studio Museum in Harlem. Her connections to the larger mainstream art world helped to redefine those relationships with that mainstream art world and the Studio Museum in Harlem. All of the artists who’ve been in residence at Studio Museum in Harlem have been the beneficiaries of that. Even when David Hammons and Alison Saar and Kerry James Marshall and Willie Cole were artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, they didn’t come out and immediately have gallery exhibitions, which is what happens now. That history took time to evolve for those others, but has now become almost an expectation for what artists hope to have happen when they come out of that residency program. It wasn’t even possible back in the ’70s, ’80s and even early ’90s. That’s a very recent development that we all have Thelma Golden to thank for.

AL Absolutely.

DB She has taken the Museum’s legacy into the twenty-first century in the best possible way. She’s a dynamo. Thelma Golden is deeply committed to the work being done in the Black and African diasporic space and how to extend that institutionally and into the larger social culture. But I think the younger artists coming out of that now have a whole different possible platform than those earlier artists like David and Kerry James and Alison did when they came out, even though each of those artists have gone on to eventually become successful; but for them, that was a decades-long process.

AL And now it’s so quick. It’s like lightning speed in comparison, right?

DB That’s an art world change, too. The pace at which things happen or the pace at which young artists expect things to happen.

AL How do you think that affects the evolution of an artist’s work over a lifetime, to have early success and to expect that? I don’t think I had expectations. I was happy and thrilled every time something good happened, but it just seemed to me that it was all hard work and I did it because I loved it and whatever happens, happens.

DB Different artists handle it in different ways. I was pleasantly surprised, for example, when Jordan Casteel, who had been in residence at Studio Museum in Harlem in 2015-2016 moved out of the city. I had made it a point to go see her show at Studio Museum when her residency was completed, met her, had conversations with her, and we became friends. She ended up asking me to write an essay for her first solo museum show, at the New Museum, “Jordan Casteel: Within Reach.” She’s been having quite a brilliant and heated career. But then, rather than stay in New York City or Brooklyn or in the heated art world environment, Jordan moved—

AL —Upstate New York. Yeah.

DBI think that being away from all of that pressure is probably very good for a young artist. Being in New York as an artist, there’s a constant pressure of expectation. And if you’re with a gallery, there’s the expectation to produce work in time for shows rather than just making work, figuring out your ideas, making mistakes, fumbling around. Figure out what you want to do and then get back to work. So, yeah, I really thought it was a beautiful thing when Jordan left the city for a more relaxed environment. And now she’s painting flowers.

Yeah, you know, right on. You don’t have to stay in one place and continue to do the same thing that’s expected of you. Leave, do something else. I really admire Jordan for making that decision. To find her own way, to find her own space that still allows her to think at her own pace. New York demands that you think and act more quickly all the time. How long can any artist sustain that? The best ones figure out a way to continue to evolve and grow as artists even with the intense scrutiny. But given the way the market is now for some of these artists, there’s a different kind of pressure on them. I don’t know that it is necessarily easily detrimental to the work, but I do know that being under that kind of pressure, in the long term, doesn’t serve the work. But everyone deals with it in their own way. I’m speaking from the vantage point of someone who spent their life in New York and is now living in Chicago.

AL You moved to Chicago because you got a teaching job there.

DB Columbia College Chicago, which I finally, after twenty-five years there, just retired from. I was recently appointed Professor Emeritus. Chicago has been an absolutely unpressured place to live and work. When I need to be in New York, I’m in New York. Then I leave. I come home. For me, as an artist who’s been working for a long time, my work already has a certain degree of traction that it almost doesn’t matter where I am, really. And Chicago now has certainly become a very different place. There’s always been a strong tradition of artists and art making here. Going back to the Imagists and the Hairy Who and even going back, with photography, to the Institute of Design and Harry Callahan.

AL And Siskind.

DB Yep, Aaron Siskind. But now, in terms of the contemporary conversation, I’m here, and I have a very good gallery here in Stephen Daiter Gallery. I started in Chicago with Rhona Hoffman Gallery. Nick Cave is here, Kerry James Marshall is here. Jessica Stockholder’s here, McArthur Binion is here. Ebony Patterson is here. Theaster Gates is here. There are enough of us here who are involved in the conversation with our work on a larger platform. And there are a lot more galleries now in Chicago than they were even when I moved here twenty-five years ago. Mariane Ibrahim just opened up a gallery here. So, it’s a very different place. But different artists deal with the pressure of New York in different ways. Now quite frankly, I don’t even know how some of them continue to afford to still be there. But a lot of them are also doing luxury brand collaborations and things of that sort. Maybe that helps them continue to be there. Myself, I’m not interested in that. Photographers don’t get to participate in that much.

AL No. We don’t get asked to do any of that.

DB Luxury brand collaborations like a Prada bag photograph? What would we do, you know?

AL I could see some new portraits of the next BMW design.(laughter)

For me, it was always important to stay in a metropolitan area because I wanted my kids to grow up in an area that is very diverse. And so, moving upstate or moving near Bard was not a good option for me. But we survived. In Brooklyn.

DB Brooklyn is a wonderful place, too. I lived there with my family for almost twenty years.

AL Brooklyn has become more expensive than Manhattan.

DBI know. It’s crazy. Because Williamsburg in Brooklyn used to be where all the artists went when they didn’t have any money.

AL Now the successful artists live in Williamsburg. Should we talk about teaching a little bit?

You were always interested in teaching, even when you were a grad student.

DB I’ve been teaching for a very long time, from the outset when Studio Museum in Harlem hired me in 1977 to teach photography classes there. But teaching for me has always only been meaningful to the extent that I’m engaged in my own work, and I have something to bring to the teaching experience. It keeps me engaged with young artists and photographers, and also gives them the benefit of my long history, experience, and knowledge. The fact that I remain active and engaged gives me something to bring into the classroom because part of what you’re teaching students is how to continue to develop ideas and make work.

AL Yeah. Your current concerns and methods.

DB How to come up with a project, how to extend the project, how to extend an idea or a group of photographs. The only way you can really talk about that is if you’ve actually done it or you’re in the midst of doing it. In the best-case scenarios, I’ve always tried to bring to my students the things that were brought to me when I was a student. I always try to remember what it feels like to be a student.

AL For sure.

DB Because even at the early stage when I was teaching at Studio Museum in Harlem, my first class, Carrie Mae Weems walked in and I still remember; we joke about it sometimes. She introduced herself, and she was very nervous, looking at the floor, looking up, looking at the floor. And then she asked me, “Do you think I could be a photographer?” Now that’s a very profound question and ever since that moment, I have felt that the responsibility of teaching is to be affirmative and as helpful as possible. Giving students a sense that yes, you can do this thing—let’s get to work. But when she asked me that, I could have said anything; I could have said, How the hell do I know? I could have been ungracious. I’d never seen her pictures; she hadn’t been making many pictures. She was like me at the beginning. Truth of the matter, I hadn’t even been making that much work. But the only right thing to say it seemed to me was “Of course you can, come on in and let’s get to work.” That’s really what teaching is, and I’ve always tried to take it that seriously. I’ve never tried to use it as a place to diminish anyone; you’re trying to give students the practical and critical skills with which they can begin to enact their own self-agency in the world to make work.

AL I think I became a better teacher after I had my first kid. Everyone has their own way of learning, and it made me more patient and more empathetic towards kids with different patterns of learning. Because artists learn differently, they’re not the standard academic on the standard academic pathways. That’s why they’re artists; their brains are wired differently.

DB So, what about your experience of working with Richard Benson and with Lois Conner? I mean, did being a student of theirs impact the way you think?

ALAbsolutely. I’m not into diminishing people either, but I know that good work ethics is the foundation for everything. And while we have met many talented grad students, unfortunately, for one reason or another, they stopped working. It’s the work ethic, and that’s something that I pound into my students. I get disappointed if they have potential and don’t follow up with the work or feel that they have done enough and just coast. I learned from Lois that nothing’s impossible with the view camera. It rains, and you have to climb up the mountain; that should not keep you from taking the view camera. And I still repeat so many things that I’ve learned from Richard; I think about him almost every day. He’s certainly somebody that I miss.

DB You had a history. I had already left music far behind me by the time I showed up in grad school. You had a background in medicine, didn’t you?

ALIn science and biology, immunology.

DB How far behind you were your medical school aspirations when you showed up at Yale?

AL I had a Master’s degree in Biology, and I had been accepted to medical school and decided not to go. But that education helped me and hindered me. It helped me in the sense that I was very systematic, and I approach everything in terms of problem solving, that nothing was impossible. But perhaps it made me . . . I needed to relax a little bit.(laughter) I needed David Hammons to tell me to relax. But that background really was helpful. I mean, at times I thought, Oh my God, I spent so much time doing all of that—was it ever wasted? But it was not a wasted experience; it helped define a clarity and objectivity that I was always interested in. But yeah, I needed to figure out what it really meant to be an artist and to experiment and not know the answer before you start, which is true in science too. You don’t know the answer when you start, but you design experiments that you think are going to lead you close to where the answer is. I never thought of myself as a teacher and I’m still very, very shocked that I have become a teacher and that I’ve been teaching for so long.

DB How long have you been teaching now?

AL I’d been at Bard for ten years. And it went from like eight years to like eighteen years and I kept saying ten years. And then I started saying I’ve been there twenty years, and now it’s more than twenty years.

DB Yeah, it was twenty-five for me before I finally retired. The thing about coming from different experiences and different backgrounds, I always tell people that I was fortunate that the first teachers that I had as a musician were very rigorous. And when it came time for performance, they all preached the same gospel. They always said, “There’s no clowning on the bandstand. We’re doing serious work here.” And there’s definitely a work ethic in terms of practice. The rigor of being an artist was something that I learned as a musician. The respect for the history of an art form is something that I got initially as a musician. So those people who I met as teachers, their sensibility sat well with who I thought I was. I wasn’t rebelling against anything they taught me; I was just taking it all in. Because I knew who they were, I knew what their histories were. I knew who they had played with, I knew the albums that they had played on, the bands that they were with. I had nothing but the ultimate respect for these folks. And that carries over pretty much to the work that I do, the way that I teach, the way I encourage students to take this seriously. Even if I wasn’t interested in making anything like that, I knew the work. I knew that that was part of the history and that was part of the history of possibility. If you did choose to go that way, here’s how somebody did that.

AL Yeah, it’s interesting to me how students sometimes gravitate towards teachers who make the kind of work that they’re interested in making. They don’t realize that sometimes someone who’s photographing in a totally different style could give them valuable life lessons, in terms of the process, in terms of how to experiment, in terms of how to be open minded about things. Students have a lot to learn.

DB True. The field itself, photography in the marketplace of ideas and in the marketplace institutionally, is different now. The most recent Society for Photographic Education (SPE) conference just happened in St Louis, Missouri. I used to go to the SPE conferences all the time, met a whole bunch of people there.

AL You’re such a nerd.(laughter)

DBYou have a go to SPE. It was really heartening to see all of these younger photographers posting on Instagram and Facebook about SPE and how good it was to see everyone again.

The difference between the photography community and the art world has always been that the photography community is smaller and, as a consequence, it is an actual community with organizations like SPE or at MoMA, where you could drop a box of pictures off on Thursday, as opposed to the larger art world. There’s the College Art Association but that’s a professional entity largely made up of professors, art historians, and other academics. But photography as a community in the past, and apparently with SPE still in the present moment and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, for example, seem to have, and always have had, their own infrastructure that supported the photography community. I did a residency at Visual Studies Workshop in 1989. I did a residency at Light Work in 1985. These were places that provided time and a stipend for photographers. Fortunately, Light Work still exists, which is another important part of the infrastructure of support.

AL Aperture is still vital.

DB I’m on the board ofAperture. Who thought I would be on the board? Not me. ButAperture still provides support to the field and still publishes photography books. Those books are selling very, very well. Photography is still a tangible and viable community.

AL And a vital medium. Look at the larger galleries; there still aren’t many photographers represented in those galleries. But at a certain time, a while back, you couldn’t switch from a photo gallery to a gallery that also showed painting and sculpture. Photography was not fully fledged art and was ghettoized in galleries selling photographs only.

DB I’ve been fortunate because I work with Stephen Daiter Gallery, a photography gallery that shows classic photography: Robert Frank, Henri Cartier Bresson, Brassaï. Being connected in the market, both through a classic photography gallery and at the same time in art galleries like Sean Kelly Gallery and Rena Bransten Gallery, helps keep my work situated in both conversations in a way that I’m most comfortable with. Because it’s two very different conversations with very different kinds of collectors.

I don’t want to be segregated only in the capital P photography conversation because photographs are not the only thing that inform and inspire my work and I want my work to be part of a larger conversation of ideas. So, it works for me, it feels right. New York is still the center of the cultural universe. There’s no place like New York for the sheer density of cultural output and consumption. Being in New York is important to me too because that’s really the center of the conversation with the greatest visibility. Showing here in Chicago, it’s a very quiet conversation, with only occasional critical support. It’s largely a conversation with the museum photography curators who come here to visit and look at the work and are still invested in the history of the medium, and the place of my work within that history.

AL Right, the gallery people, and those from the museums and the different biennials and other important group shows, travel across the country now to look at work. A lot of those group shows, 15-20 years ago, were all Los Angeles, New York. And if you worked in the Midwest, you had to make a conscious effort to bring your work to New York. Photographers would make a special trip to drop off on Thursday at MoMA. You know, the pilgrimage.

DB Yep. The Museum of Contemporary Photography here in Chicago is very similar. They still look at work and have portfolio viewing days. And they have an extraordinary collection as well. But that’s also emblematic of the way things work in the photography community, unlike the art world. There’s no painting department in any museum in the world where you can just call up, make an appointment, and drop off ten canvases. Which means photography in the museum has been a more accessible space for those of us who are making the work. The fact that we could drop photographs off at MoMA and you didn’t have to put a CV in there.

AL No, no. You didn’t even have to include a statement. You didn’t even have to describe your project.

DB From what I remember, all they wanted to see were the pictures. Oh, how extraordinary was that!

AL I think that curators have also shifted their relationship vis-à-vis the artist. When we were coming out of school, it seemed that they had the power, and there was a discrepancy in terms of that. But now they maintain a long-term relationship because it’s about seeing an artist evolve over time.

DB Yeah, it’s very different for the younger curators now, not so much for the older generation. There were always some, but curators now want to feel connected to the culture and the ideas in an immediate way. They want to know who’s making the work. They want to meet them. They want to be plugged into the making of culture. I think it’s all for the good.

AL Yeah, I mean, some artists are discovered on Instagram, you know?

DB I have no idea how that works. But I’ve heard of it happening enough times that I know it does. I mean there’s a whole other, much more democratic infrastructure.

AL And an accessibility that was not so possible.

DB Yeah, I think they want to be plugged in. They don’t want to miss anything. They want to know what’s going on. They would love to be able to be the first one to show that work.

The degree of relationships and access that younger artists have to curators is much greater now than it ever has been. I’ve always been an optimist but I’ve always told my students, It’s impossible to do really interesting work and keep it in front of as many people as possible and have nothing happen. Something will happen. If I see interesting work, I’ll talk to one of my curator friends about it. Most people who see interesting work talk to other people about it. So, I encourage students, and artists in general, just keep making the work and find places where you can publicize where it is so people can get to it.

AL Also, it’s a matter of time. Sometimes you feel out of sync. Right now, painting is mostly figurative, and you’re doing things that are more abstract, but the wave is going to come back with abstraction really soon. It’s just a matter of sticking around long enough and keep on working.

DB Sticking around, keep making the work. It only makes sense if you really love to do this. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense at all.

AL Is there anything else?

DB Maybe. I can’t think of anything I’ve missed. Can you think of anything?

AL Oh yeah, we didn’t talk about the Birmingham Project. It was a brilliant way to work with the present but then set up a framework that immediately brings history into that present. And that’s why it was so powerful. How did you come up with this idea? I know the genesis of the project. You had been marked by seeingthe photograph of Sarah Jean Collins, the girl who survived, by Frank Dandridge. But can you talk specifically about the whole conceptualization of the project?

DB The Birmingham work is really where all of my current work begins. It was the transition into history. Even though I always say, too, that I was in Harlem in 1975 because of my family's history there. My parents met there and while they moved to Queens, I still had relatives who were living in Harlem while I was growing up. So, I've probably been interested in history for longer than I would have articulated in that way. But the Birmingham work had such an auspicious beginning because I first saw the picture of that girl, 12-year-old Sarah Jean Collins, when I was eleven years old and my parents brought home this book,The Movement,a book of photographs of and about the Civil Rights Movement. The writer and playwright Lorraine Hansberry had been commissioned by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to write a text that would weave these photographs together. There were a number of horrific pictures in there, there were lynching photographs. But for whatever reason, the photograph that seared its way into my psyche was of this young girl, Sarah Jean Collins, the sister of Addie Mae Collins, one of the girls who had been killed in the dynamiting of the 16th Street Baptist Church. This picture in the book was of her with gauze bandages over her eyes.

You know, I thought years later that it might have been because I was pretty much the same age as the girl in that picture. But that picture seared its way into my psyche. I never forgot it and something shook it loose, a good forty-five, fifty years later, something made that photograph come rushing back. I sat up in bed early one morning. You know that expression to sit bolt upright? I didn’t know what it meant until that moment. And then I just sat bolt upright in bed, and I saw the image of that girl. So, I decided I needed to go to Birmingham. Because that picture in that moment was obviously floating around in my psyche somewhere. I didn’t know anybody in Birmingham. I’d never been to Birmingham before. I just booked the flight to go to Birmingham to stay for a weekend, Friday evening and back Monday morning, just to look around and to see the place where this had happened. I made a visit to 16th Street Baptist Church on Sunday morning to introduce myself to the minister to let him know I was there and I was thinking about coming back at some point to do something. I didn’t even know what. I realized almost immediately how complicated everything was because when I told the minister why I wanted to come back. he said, “Well, here at 16th Street Baptist Church, we’re not about all that business, we’re about the business of Jesus Christ.” I was polite, I said, “Okay, thank you, thank you, I understand, good to meet you.” Now I’m coming here thinking about history. He’s standing here thinking about the here and now. And that’s what that little exchange left me with. But I knew I wanted to come back and make some work. What kind of work? I had no idea. We haven’t really talked about this, but most of the work and projects that I’ve done start with me having a conversation with a museum. So, I got in touch with one of the acting curators of African American art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, sent her an e-mail, and told her, I have an idea for making some work there and I’d love to come down and visit with you to talk about it. Of course, talking about it meant at some point, I would make some work that might be exhibited. But I just wanted to start a conversation. I made that initial visit, started to meet people in Birmingham, and then I kind of got adopted by one of the members of their contemporary art group called Sankofa Committee. Jim Sokol, a member of that committee, got in touch with me and said, “I understand you’re interested in doing something here in Birmingham. When you come back, I’d love to show you around and you can stay with me and my wife.”

So that was the beginning. I was in the middle of the Class Pictures project (2002-2006) and I wanted to finish that work before actually beginning the Birmingham project. And over several years, starting with Jim introducing me to people who had been actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the ’60s, visiting the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, visiting their archive, looking through all the archival material about that day, that moment, looking at newspaper articles, hanging out in barbershops, hanging out, just meeting people, letting people in the broader community know that I’m interested in doing something here and at some point I’m going to be back. But for now, I just want to make an introduction and say hello. I did that for several years because over those years of visiting, I’m trying to figure out what the heck am I going to make. People were throwing suggestions at me. I finally met the Director of the Birmingham Museum of Art who made a tentative commitment. She said, “Well, let’s see what you come up with.” But I had no idea what I wanted to do. It was suggested that I make pictures of the survivors of the Civil Rights Movement, do more portraits. I don’t do that kind of work, that’s not what I do. And then the idea struck me that I could make portraits of those African Americans in Birmingham who were the same ages as those young people who had been killed. Maybe that could be a way to go. Or maybe I could make portraits of people in Birmingham who are the ages that those young people would have been if they—

AL Had they not—

DB Yeah, at that time. To give them a more tangible presence. And then at some point I began to think it might be even more interesting to put these two together. These young people who are now the ages those young people were with older people who are now the age that they would have been. Maybe I can make some diptych photographs out of these and open up the whole question of the passage of time. And engage history with the past and the present simultaneously. It was a huge conceptual breakthrough for me. It was still rooted in the portrait. But now the portraits took on a different meaning. It wasn’t just a portrait of this individual, but this individual representing someone else from the past who is no longer here, whose presence could be invoked through their presence. So, that was the first time that I began to engage what had been an ongoing investigation, the idea of creating a liminal space in the work that is simultaneously past and present.

AL I mean, it’s such an active way of using the diptych as well, right? It’s just not a continuation of the visual image; it’s also a continuum of time, and a break in time. Present and past together, but also a continuum in a formal and conceptual way.

DB I had made diptych portraits in the Polaroid studio with the 2-0 x 24 Polaroids before. The idea of the diptych was part of my formal vocabulary. I was thinking about it in terms of a slight shift in time, and not time across fifty years.

AL Right, you were thinking in terms of instantaneity, so someone just shifts their head a little bit and you get an extension of time.

DB Moving your hand, so one picture will be this, the other would be that. To activate the photograph to bring a more cinematic sense of time and movement to the still photograph. This was a different way of thinking about the diptych, as a signifier of a memorialized time, and as a signifier for those young people who have been lost, of these young people who are here and those older people who had been present at that moment. And to put them together physically in a way that embodied 50 years. Each one would embody the idea of 50 years, 1963 and 2013. That work was a real breakthrough for me to continue working with this idea of how can one make work that embodies the past and the present simultaneously? While I was in Birmingham, I did drive around with my assistant looking at certain places because in the South, history hangs so heavily in the air. In the South, you can almost reach out and touch it. I knew from working on the Birmingham Project that I wanted to both continue this idea of past/present and that I wanted to center that work in the South, where African Americans entered into the American conversation and landscape, through the South and through the institution of slavery. The Birmingham work moved my work to a very different place.

AL Yeah, it was a great breakthrough.

DB A huge conceptual breakthrough, which then allowed me to think about other ways to engage history outside of the framework of the portrait. Because when I started thinking about history— going back from that more recent moment of trauma to the formative moment of the plantation, the Underground Railroad, and then going back to Richmond, which is the very moment/place in which Africans are brought into America and enslaved—the portrait didn’t seem to have any place conceptually in that work. I didn’t want to do reenactment photographs. How would I do that? That’s when I turned more resolutely to looking at place. The way the history resides in the place, in the landscape and figuring out how to make that work.

AL Right, how to create the tension and how to create this undercurrent of darkness and devastation.

DB The Birmingham work set me off in this direction. Now the other piece of it is the color work in Harlem that I spent several years making.Harlem Redux was the first time that the figure, the portrait, was no longer the subject of the work. That’s the first time that I began looking at the narrative of place and space in a community that I had photographed forty-something years before. I wanted to visualize the changes taking place in that community. That work,Harlem Redux,came beforeNight Coming Tenderly, Black and the other landscapes. That was the most difficult work I think I’ve ever made.

AL Really?

DB Oh yeah, I learned everything that I learned about making landscape photographs and spent years making that work.

AL The urban landscape.

DB Yeah, even though it’s urban landscape, it’s very different.Harlem Reduxwas torturously difficult work. So much so that one day I said to myself, Well, maybe this is it, you’ve had a good run, you’ve made some good work, you’re in a lot of museums, you just got yourself a MacArthur, you’re doing all right, so maybe—

ALHow is it torturously difficult? Can you talk about that?

DB Right, right, the struggle with the landscape. When I started theHarlem Redux work, it was painfully difficult. And I knew I wasn’t going to, but I definitely felt like tossing in the towel, putting the camera away and just start writing my memoir! (laughter)

Yeah, landscapes. Where do I start? Where is the thing I’m looking for? The first pictures that I made with theHarlem Reduxwork were utter failures. I would look at the contact sheets, but picture by picture I started to see the things that I was imagining. It was just a matter of continuing to work until I started getting those results more consistently.

AL How long did that project take, a few years?

DB2014 through 2017, three or four years. Yeah, and by the time I completed that project, I had the confidence to go out into the world and make photographs that were not portraits anchored to the human subject. But the beginning of that work was painful—

AL It’s almost a different language, going from landscape to portrait, or portrait to landscape or indoor or outdoor.

DB It was like learning a different language. I had to learn how to speak the language of space and place. But at the end of the day, knowing what I know about the history of the medium, the wide range of pictures that have been made, like Stephen Shore’s work, I mean, I’d seen work like that. But to be out there in the world without the human subject and gesture being the anchor. Even with the Birmingham work, I had the people sitting in the church pews and doing this and that, looking this way, looking that way. I know how to direct the quality of the gaze. I know how to do that very well. But now in the absence of that, man, it was painful, but I figured it out. You just have to stay there and do the work. The Aloft Hotel in Harlem became my ground zero and I would book myself there for a week or two, just get up every morning and go out and try to make this thing that I was imagining happen. And then I started to see things from the hotel window. And then I started booking rooms in the hotel for different—

AL Just to get the view.

DB Yeah. Just to get the view that I was looking for. And eventually, it all started to make sense. But it was a painful beginning, and I hadn’t had that experience in a long time. I don’t remember ever having had that painful of an experience starting a project.Birmingham was portraits, so I knew what to do. I was just going to do it in a place that had a different context; it was going to mean something else. I know how to get people to look at the lens. I know how to look at their gesture before they sit down and ask them to repeat that gesture in front of the camera so that it’s their gesture. I had like forty years of knowing how to do that, and now I’m completely unmoored from all that and I’m out in the middle of the street looking for something.(laughter)

AL You were challenging yourself and that’s remarkable. Even a younger artist may have given up, but you persisted.

DB I’ve never wanted to become my own oldies show. I could have easily taken that camera out there and made some contemporary portraits of Harlem. But I was reaching for something else.

AL You wanted to be uncomfortable, you wanted to challenge yourself.

DB Yeah. It was the most recent significant challenge. I wanted to talk about the changing physical and social geography of that community, the way the past was rapidly slipping into the present. And it taught me everything I needed to know about the work that I’m now doing.

AL You’re only stronger, right?

DB There’s no more struggle. It’s just the struggle of individual problem solving with each landscape. It made me much more confident being in that space than when I started out. Okay, I think—

AL —that’s it. It’s a wrap.

DB It’s been fun. It’s always a good thing to revisit one’s own narrative.

AL It was great to reconnect with your work in detail. Are you going to be in Chicago the weekend May 20th?

DB Sure, I’ll be here.We could see some music or something.

AL Yeah, and a good dinner.

DB I’ll bring you out for dinner at my favorite restaurant, Virtue.

Since 2014, BOMB’s Oral History Project (OHP) has published in-depth, longform interviews with visual artists of the African diaspora. Focus cities were expanded from New York to include New Orleans and Chicago in 2022.

The Oral History Project is made possible with a major grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Dedalus Foundation, Toni L. Ross, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

An excerpt of “Dawoud Bey by An-My Lê” appeared in BOMB Magazine Issue 168/Summer 2024 (purchase the issue here).

Support BOMB’s mission to deliver the artist’s voice.