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Families For the past twenty-seven years my photographic work has been concerned with the human subject. During this time I have tried to make photographs that describe the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of this subject. While I have devised various formal strategies for articulating these concerns, I think fundamentally the work is driven by a basic curiosity. I seek to find out things about people by making photographs of them. If done well, I believe the photographic representation of the human subject has the potential to be more revealing than what is revealed by the eye alone, since the human glance is usually a momentary one. Making photographs with the large format camera, as I presently do, allows for a more sustained look at the person and, hopefully, an opportunity for some insight that goes beyond the surface. I began making photographs in the streets using the small, hand-held 35mm camera in 1975 and in 1988 started working with the 4 x 5 camera out of a desire to slow down my working process and establish a more reciprocal and sustained relationship with the person I was photographing. In 1991 I began using the 20 x 24 Polaroid camera in the studio and continued working with this camera until a year ago. During this time I began working with the idea of the multiple-image photograph. Wanting to challenge the idea that a photograph represents merely a single moment in time, I began making large-scale pieces that took upwards of four hours to make, since each individual image alone required a considerable amount of time to make, given the unwieldiness of this 235-pound instrument. In addition to the aspect of time, I wanted to find a way to articulate the shifting emotions and responses on the part of the subject that occurred during the time it took to make the finished piece. Most recently I have begun working again with the 4 x 5 camera, returning to the streets and the natural environment as the site for making the work. My subjects, as they have been for some ten years, have been young people, since I feel that young people are a largely overlooked and stereotyped population. Working on the commissioned project for the Gund Foundation allowed me to attach my various concerns for the human subject and the multiple-image photograph to a specific community of people who I believe are also seldom represented within the larger culture. It is my hope that these photographs both provide some insight into the subjects while standing alongside the good works done by the organizations that served them all so well, Cleveland Works and the Cleveland Housing Network.
About Dawoud Bey Dawoud Bey often builds his compositions from multiple images taken from slightly different perspectives and at slightly different times. He then groups the individual photographs together to create large, revealing portraits. By utilizing plain backgrounds, he concentrates on the sitters, capturing their personalities and interrelationships.
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