Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995

In his large-format color Polaroid portraits, Dawoud Bey aims “to make an unabashedly lush and romantic rendering of people who seldom receive that kind of attention.” Some of his favorite subjects are streetwise African American teenagers for whom eye contact is a finely-judged art. They face the camera with a sort of edgy candor, half bravado, half suspicion, accentuated by the arrangement of the triples. This well-illustrated book is the first major publication to survey Bey's 20-year career and coincides with an exhibition at the Walker Center traveling to other museums across the country.