Today we go #InDetail with Dawoud Bey’s photograph, Braxton McKinney and LaVon Thomas, 2012, from "The Birmingham Project." Please join us on Thursday, July 9 via zoom for Tea Time with Sean and Dawoud Bey at 3:30pm EST. Link to register in bio.
One of #DawoudBey’s most powerful bodies of work, this series featuring 16 diptychs (32 paired portraits), is a deeply felt and conceptually rich tribute to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which took place in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963. For this body of work, Bey created a series of photographs in which he paired two life-size portraits representing the victims of the bombing and related violence in Birmingham: one is a photograph of a young person who was the same age as one of the victims on that tragic day; the other is an image of an adult approximately 50 years older, the age that child would have been in 2013 had he or she survived.
“I wanted to engage the idea of the passage of time, and the fact that those young people never had a chance to live out their lives, I decided to make portraits of African American adults in Birmingham who were the ages they would have been had their lives not been cut short… All of the adults in the photos remembered that Sunday morning; a few of them knew the girls who were killed, since they would have been the same ages.” – Dawoud Bey, The Guardian, Oct 9, 2018
@DawoudBey, Braxton McKinney and LaVon Thomas, 2012, two archival pigment prints mounted to Dibond, overall: 40 13/16 x X 65 5/8 x 1 5/8 inches, edition of 6 + 2 APs