Young Man at a Tent Revival, Brooklyn, NY

Narrator: In photographs like Young Man at a Tent Revival, Brooklyn, NY, Bey began working in a more collaborative way with his subjects.

Dawoud Bey: Making the street portraits, I was looking to photograph ordinary African Americans in the midst of living their lives. And I would just momentarily enter their lives with my camera, my tripod, my positive-negative Polaroid film and ask them if I could make a photograph of them. And I told them that thirty seconds after we do this I’m going to give you a print. Then of course they wanted to know how much do you want. I said, no, it’s not that kind of thing. I’m going to give you the photograph.

I started photographing with a 4x5 camera, which of course is very different from photographing with a small 35 millimeter camera which is held in the hand and which you can work with very spontaneously. A 4x5 camera mounted on a tripod implies a much more deliberate way of working. And certainly in terms of making portraits, a much more consensual way of working. Things have to be positioned in front of the camera. If they move, you can’t just quickly move with them. A 4x5 negative allows for making a much larger photograph, which is something else that I wanted to do with this work, was to give the Black subjects in the work a more physically enhanced presence on the wall.