Lorna, New York, NY

Narrator: The artist Lorna Simpson is a longtime friend of Bey’s. He photographed her in 1992 while working in the 20x24 Polaroid Studio, using a camera that produced 20x24-inch prints. 

Dawoud Bey: By then I had been making photographs in the streets for a very long time. And I decided I wanted to think about other ways in which I could continue making portraits. 

Narrator: In the Polaroid studio, Bey worked with the support of a technician. The camera weighed 265 pounds, and its bellows was about 6 feet long when fully extended. 

Dawoud Bey: As I was making those initially individual portraits, we had to pin them up on the wall in the studio both to look at them to make sure everything was right with them, but also so that they could dry. And when I started, I mean, each portrait was always more than one exposure. But I thought about it in the conventional way in which one makes several photographs, and then you look at them, and then you choose the one photograph that best exemplifies that particular situation. And as I was pinning them up and looking at them I began to feel like they looked even more interesting together. 

And the implications of the work in terms of an expanded sense of time, and animation was even more interesting than the single portrait. And so I started making a group of diptych portraits. The lighting and the staging was similar, except one portrait with the person directly engaging the camera and the viewer. And the second one, they were not engaging the camera and they had a different quality of introspection.