At the age of 16, New York native Dawoud Bey traveled from his home in Queens to see Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968, the controversial exhibition that opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969.
As he gazed upon the portraits that James Van Der Zee made during the Harlem Renaissance, Bey recognised the profound power of the photograph to become both a repository for communal memory and a portal into another era - one that informs the way we live and think today.
This innate understanding of the portrait at a young, formative age, provided the foundation upon which he has built a tremendous, transformative body of work. Over the past half a century, Bey's photographs have become both art and artefact, evidence and testimony, document of the moment and letter to the future.
