…[I]n making your work, you’re always engaged in a historical conversation. There’s a long table full of people who have done significant things, and then you come along and there’s an empty seat. But you gotta have something to say.
— Dawoud Bey, on Photographing People and Communities, 21.
Happy Birthday, Dawoud! I hope you find yourself in good spirits, great health, and continued vitality.
We first met in the summer of 2008. Baltimore summers are really something special.
I remember seeing the call for high school students to join you in creating your artist-in-residence project at The Walters Art Museum. Portraits Re/Examined: A Dawoud Bey Project. So much was new and exciting in my life at the time. As a senior of a different sort, I had “retired” from playing basketball earlier that year, much to the dismay of my coaches at Woodlawn High School. At the time, I didn’t know that playing basketball overseas was an option, and I couldn’t see myself dedicating another 4 years of my life to doing something that became far more business than pleasure. Filling that newly-opened class period with Mrs. Muse’s ‘Intro to Photography’ class changed my whole trajectory.
I wasn’t new to photography when I met you. My mom was the first artist I knew. Photography was her means to explore — identity, culture, naming, history, style, and above all, people. Black people — as has become true for me. She put Gordon Parks’ seminal work ‘A Choice of Weapons’ in my hand when I was 16 or 17 (neither of us quite remember).
All of the images in this gallery are courtesy of my mother and artist. Sonjia Hanshaw.
Since I graduated from high school just a few weeks prior to the program beginning, I technically shouldn’t have been able to join the program — as it was only open to current high school students at the time — but I’ve never been one to take just one no as an absolute.
That’s me kneeling w/the locs!
I remember how intentionally I sought to chat with you outside of the daily work of the summer program. Between exploring archives, sitting in slightly-less-than-comfortable and far-too-stuffy rooms, I found myself interested in your thinking far more than your teaching (both were great, btw). Fortunately, I was far too naïve to not approach you. I wanted to learn from you (seeing myself) as a colleague in the work of archiving the lives of our people, not just as a student in a summer program. Fortunately, you were so incredibly giving of your time and your mind. Around you, all of what I had in my head felt possible. We’d sit and chat over lunch on the west side park of Washington Monument and Mount Vernon Place about so many things. Do you remember that?
When Portraits Re/Examined opened, that signaled the end of our formal means of encountering each other. I’d have to find another way. 12 years later, I think this is it.
There were some notes that foreshadow this happy birthday wish though.
I left Baltimore in 2012. I had become a solid-image maker at the time — I could make money through the craft, but I wasn’t into image-making for the money of it. I was into gathering stories. I was into learning and communing with everyday black folks, with the images being a celebration of the encounter.
It wasn’t all fun, games and clicks. Actually, most of it didn’t click. I courted and flirted with this love of image-making in the way I do now for years — only to run from the alter each time I was ready to say “I do this.” It knew it was mine. It loved me more than I trusted it. When I’m behind a camera, I literally see in black and white; how did I take that for granted?
“Photography is great, but I need to do something more materially impactful for my people.”, was the reason I’d tell myself most often. That hesitation (thanks Wekesa!) took me to Houston, to Oakland, to architecture, to Mumia Abu-Jamal, to Black Power Media, to the African Union, to education, and more. Funny enough, photography always found a way to let me know that it was my gift to share. It was often the reason why I was where I was in the first place.
I found fragments of that love when I returned to the copy ‘Class Pictures’ you gave me. I’d see it in the textures, smiles, gait, style, sounds, and lives of our people in Accra, Havana, Axum, Atlanta, Tamale, and Portland (both Oregon and Jamaica). I found fragments when I moved to Atlanta in 2015. I became (and still am) incredibly close with my previous relationship partner’s parents. Her dad has been a photographer and educator for decades, too. I hope you two are able to meet one day. His incredible ability to blend psychology, Africa, love, sadness, therapy, healing, joy, peace, and power — through image and word — forms the basis of what I admire most about him. It’s what I’ve always gotten from your work.
These fragments have formed into a tapestry of trust — a circle of trust, if you will. It’s been a grand homecoming. It’s been good to step further inside of it.
I picked up a copy of your work with aperture, the above referenced ‘Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities | Aperture’ earlier this year. As I read through it felt something similar to how some people describe seeing a ghost. I didn’t realize how much your thinking and image-making influenced my own. “Shit,” was all I could chuckle to myself as I turned pages, finding familiarity in your grace, gentleness, seriousness, and approach to this thing we call photography.
I’m so glad today is your birthday. I’m so glad I’m getting to write this from the place that I find myself in, today. I’m settling into my seat at the long table. My ears, mind, and heart are incredibly open. I’m careful but confident. I know that I have something to say.
Thank you for that.
Happy birthday.