Dawoud Bey in Conversation with Denise Wolff

Join Aperture at PHOTOFAIRS New York, a new contemporary art fair dedicated to photo-based works, digital art, and new media.

Dawoud Bey will be honored at the Aperture Gala in October as one of the most influential artists of his generation. Also, this fall, Aperture will publish Dawoud Bey: Elegy (with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, VMA), which brings together a trilogy of Bey’s recent series that focus on landscape, history, and memory, including new work commissioned by the VMA, and to accompany a forthcoming solo exhibition. In anticipation of this moment, Denise Wolff and Bey discuss current projects and his conviction that “[w]e all have a role to play in being active and engaged citizens in our respective fields.”

This event is presented in partnership with PHOTOFAIRS NY.

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Dawoud Bey (born in New York, 1953) is an American photographer, whose work is featured in major collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Bey’s honors include fellowships from MacArthur, United States Artists, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Arts. He is a professor of art and a former distinguished college artist at Columbia College Chicago. Among his monographs and writings on photography are the Aperture titles Class Pictures (2007) and Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities: The Photography Workshop Series (2019).

Denise Wolff is senior editor in the book program. She focuses mainly on commissioning and editing books for a broad audience, including The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip by David Campany (2014) and Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography by Susan Bright (2017), for which she also cocurated the accompanying exhibitions; The Photographer’s Playbook: 307 Assignments and Ideas by Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern (2014); Girl Pictures by Justine Kurland (2020); The Colors We Share by Angélica Dass (2021); and Eyes Open: 23 Photography Projects for Curious Kids by Susan Meiselas (2021). In addition, Denise spearheads The Photography Workshop Series, with titles by Dawoud Bey, Larry Fink, Todd Hido, Mary Ellen Mark, Richard Misrach, and Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb.

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Image: Whitten Sabbatini