I thought of my conversation with Andre while immersed in a new book from the photographer Dawoud Bey, “Street Portraits,” which collects his images from the late eighties and early nineties. Bey, who is sixty-eight and one of the most influential living photographers in the U.S., came of age in Queens, and gained an interest in photography for how it offered an opportunity to show the communities he knew. He showed his first solo exhibit, “Harlem, U.S.A.,” at the Studio Museum in 1979, and has been celebrated, over the last four decades, for his rich, nuanced images of Black American life. (A retrospective of Bey’s career will be on display at the Whitney Museum this spring.) Though Bey has recently turned toward more conceptual work, he is most renowned for his portraiture: he spent fifteen years making photographs of high-school students for a series called “Class Pictures,” and shot a portrait of Barack Obama, then a Presidential hopeful, in 2007.
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