Dawoud Bey: Class Pictures - Hardcover

Taro Nettleton; Jock Reynolds; Carrie Mae Weeks

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1597110434 ISBN 13: 9781597110433

Publisher: Aperture, 2007

Synopsis

For the past 15 years, Dawoud Bey has been making striking, large-scale color portraits of students at high schools across the United States. Depicting teenagers from a wide economic, social and ethnic spectrum--and intensely attentive to their poses and gestures--he has created a highly diverse group portrait of a generation that intentionally challenges teenage stereotypes.
Bey spends two to three weeks in each school, taking formal portraits of individual students, each made in a classroom during one 45-minute period. At the start of the sitting, each subject writes a brief autobiographical statement. By turns poignant, funny or harrowing, these revealing words are an integral part of the project, and the subject's statement accompanies each photograph in the book. Together, the words and images in "Class Pictures" offer unusually respectful and perceptive portraits that establish Dawoud Bey as one of the best portraitists at work today.

About this title

About the Author:

Dawoud Bey earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art and is professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago. He has been featured in numerous exhibitions―including a midcareer survey at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1995―and has received several awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.

Review:

"Dawoud Bey's Class Pictures consist of striking, large-scale portraits of students at high schools across the United States. Their strength is borne from formal simplicity in which each sitter returns the gaze with an expression of seriousness." -- Debra Klomp Ching --Photo District News

"As for those who make up the genus American teenager, Bey has done them the greatest possible service, taking them seriously without patronizing or promoting them... Photography may conceal truth by framing the world, but it resists falsehood by drawing our attention to the visible. For Bey, that is the medium's saving grace. We create categories, but the camera confounds them." -- Lyle Rexer --Photograph Magazine

"The inequity of sadness among Bey's subjects is stark, but his tender portraits afford them all the same dignity. It's striking to see teens portrayed with so little sensation: there isn't a Gossip Girl in the bunch." -- Jennie Yabroff --Newsweek

"A new monograph by Columbia College photo teacher Dawoud Bey penetrates the social veneer of American high school students." -- Mary Goodwin --American Photo

"Bey's disarming portraits of students and their accompanying autobiographical statements challenge the stereotype of the angst-ridden, self-absorbed youngster--while showing a photographer at his best." --Chicago Magazine

About this edition

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1597110434
• ISBN 13: 9781597110433
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 163