A Talk with Photographer Dawoud Bey

Art+Auction commissioned Dawoud Bey, 55, to photograph the four art patrons who appear in this month’s feature story on African-American collectors: dealer June Kelly, curator Lowery Stokes Sims and collectors Danny Simmons and Tonya Lewis Lee. Here he chats about the project, his long friendships with all of the subjects save for Lee, whom he was delighted to meet for the first time while on assignment for A+A, and his own art collection.

Tell me a little bit about your work. When did you first pick up a camera?

I inherited my first camera from my godfather when I was 15 years old. I started making photographs seriously in 1975, on the streets of Harlem. These images were shown in my debut one-person museum show, “Harlem, USA,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. From the very beginning, I was interested in using the camera to describe the experience of ordinary people. Since 1992, I’ve been focused on teenagers as the primary subjects of my work, wanting to capture something about this important moment of transition between childhood and adulthood.

How did you feel when A+A approached you with this project?

I don’t do a lot of commissions for publications, preferring to do the work I that I think matters the most in terms of what I want to say as an artist. With this project, though, it was different. I’ve gotten more comfortable over the years doing commissioned work, and the subjects were all people I’ve known for at least 25 years, except for Tonya Lee, who was still someone I knew something about. Blacks in the art world are not always given the same degree of visibility as their white counterparts; often it’s as if they exist in a kind of separate, parallel universe. So I thought this was a good move for A+A and that I wouldn’t mind being a part of it.

What was your introduction to the Lee family like?

Since I didn’t know them, I was particularly keen on seeing what the Lees had in their collection and was pleasantly surprised to find a number of my favorite artists there, including the late painter Norman Lewis, who was one of the second-generation New York Abstract Expressionists. Lewis was part of the scene at the Cedar Bar [a hangout frequented by prominent Abstract Expressionist painters and beat writers in the 1950s and 60s in New York’s East Village] but, like Edward Clark, another Black painter, he has never been fully accorded his place in that history. I had met and photographed Lewis some 30 years ago and came to know his widow, Ouida, well, so it was nice to see one of his “Black” paintings hanging in the Lees’ home. It was also nice to see Gordon Park’s work among their photographs, since Park was a very early inspiration to me. [Among other roles, Park was a photographer, musician, poet, and film director. He is perhaps best remembered for his direction of the 1971 movie Shaft and for his many memorable Life magazine photo essays.]

Which collection was your favorite to photograph?

Since I’ve known Danny since high school, and his collection contains works by a number of people who I’ve also known for a very long time, such as Adger Cowans, Jules Allen and Albert Chong, I’d have to pick his. Chong’s photograph of Lorna Simpson brought back a lot of memories, since it was made when Chong, Simpson and I were all undergraduate students at the School of Visual Arts in the mid to late 1970s.

How did you come to know June Kelly and Lowery Stokes Sims?

I met Lowery Sims when she had just begun working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the early 1970s. At that time she was working in the education department, and she later became a curator of modern art there. I met June Kelly years before she opened her gallery. She had previously been Romare Bearden’s manager, and when I was much younger, I used to do a lot of photographing of art objects for museums, galleries and artists. So I probably met her through photographing Bearden’s work, since there are books out there that still have my photo credit next to his paintings. Ultimately, though, we were all part of a larger community, and from going to various openings, parties, and exhibitions, and through many mutual friends, we came to know each other over the years.