Dawoud Bey: Seeing Black Lives Deeply
(Working Title)
A Black Panther and a musician in his youth, Dawoud Bey has overcome a life-long struggle with severe hearing loss to challenge photographic stereotypes of American Blacks. He has portrayed plantation life and the Underground Railroad through abstract landscapes and civil rights struggles through startling portraits. His creativity and passion have influenced generations of Black artists.
Bey made his name as a street photographer in Harlem, challenging stereotypes of Black men, women, and children. "African Americans are very often viewed through the lens of social pathology," Bey explains. It's been his life's passion to infuse that collective view with a deep, complex humanity. "It's to kind of reshape the world, one person at a time." His portraits of Black Americans are artistic and intimate but also social and political.
Bey is haunted by the history of Black people in America. He has imagined the dark, forbidding landscapes of the Underground Railroad to suggest the courage of escaped slaves as they made the perilous journey north to freedom. Bey said,“the trauma of the African-American presence sits just beneath the surface.”
Bey’s work has been widely influential. He’s had numerous exhibits at top museums, like the Whitney, MOMA and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He’s won many prestigious awards and grants like the McArthur “genius grant” fellowship. Bey has also taught and mentored thousands of aspiring photographers. Our documentary will include artists and former students – his fellow photographers Carrie Mae Weems, Deborah Willis, and Latoya Ruby Frazier, his friends like painters Kerry James Marshall, installation artist Theaster Gates, and poet/painter/writer Danny Simmons, who grew up with Bey in Queens. Throughout we will show how Dawoud Bey has reflected our world for the past half century, how his genius has made photography into art.
Directors: Barry Mayo and Susan Farkas
Barry Mayo is a longtime radio executive and director of Maya Osborne: Confessions of a Quadroon.
Susan Farkas, a six-time Emmy award winning executive producer for NBC News, is now an independent producer, journalism professor at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a freelance writer.
