A Man in a Bowler Hat

Narrator: Bey has described A Man in a Bowler Hat as his first successful photograph.

Dawoud Bey: There’s no evident discomfort. It doesn’t look like a stranger standing in front of him with a camera making a photograph. And the success of that work would be the camera itself disappeared. You don’t look at those portrait-based works and think about the camera. So it moves from being a photograph or a photographic object to being an experience between you and that individual. And that was always my ambition with that work. 

Narrator: Bey knew that he wanted to photograph this man as soon as he saw him. But at first, the twenty-two-year-old photographer didn’t have the nerve to ask, as the man was standing with a group of friends.

Dawoud Bey: And then I got to the end of the block and started having a conversation with myself because it was clear that if I was going to do and be what I thought I wanted to do and make the kind of photographs that I wanted to make then I was going to have to figure this out.

Narrator: Bey did end up approaching the man and asked if he might make a photograph of him. This kind of direct engagement runs throughout the series that he called Harlem, U.S.A.

Dawoud Bey: I spent about five years getting to know the community, allowing people in the community to get to know me, and trying to make what I felt was an honest representation of African Americans in that particular urban community. That in some ways stood in relation to the more, I guess you could say, pathologically-driven representations of African Americans. 

It was an interesting thing because what I came to realize was that in making those photographs there was not only the picture-making part, but there was very clearly the social part: how does one insert themselves momentarily into someone’s life and come away with something that resonates with some real aspect of the individual?