[5] According to The New York Times, "in the seemingly simple gesture of photographing Black subjects in everyday life, [Bey, an African American,] helped to introduce Blackness in the context of fine art long before it was trendy, or even accepted"[6] Born David Edward Smikle in New York City's Jamaica, Queens neighborhood, he changed his name to Dawoud Bey in the early 1970s.
[8] He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1977 to 1978, and spent the next two years as part of the CETA-funded Cultural Council Foundation Artists Project.
In 1990, he graduated with a BFA in Photography from Empire State College, and received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1993.
[16] During the 1980s, Bey collaborated with the artist David Hammons, documenting the latter's performance pieces - Bliz-aard Ball Sale and Pissed Off.
The article "Exhibits Challenge Us Not to Look Away Photographers Focus on Pain, Reality in the City" by Carolyn Cohen from the Boston Globe, identifies Bey's work as having a "definite political edge" to it according to Roy DeCarava.
[20] This new direction in his work guided Bey for the next fifteen years, including two additional residencies at the Addison, an ample number of similar projects across the country, and culminated in a major 2007 exhibition and publication of portraits of teenagers organized by Aperture and entitled Class Pictures.
"[Bey] manages to capture all the complicated feelings of being young — the angst, the weight of enormous expectations, the hope for the future — with a single look.
The video shows locations "charged with significance for the black community in Birmingham during the Civil Rights era—a schoolroom, a lunch counter, a barbershop, and a beauty parlor".
[26] ‘Night Coming Tenderly, Black’ (2017) is a series of 25 photographs by Bey that reimagines the final part of the journey along the ‘Underground Railroad’.
These landscape photographs, that were taken in the day were printed in dark black and grey tones which allowed details to emerge slowly.
The monochrome images of ‘The Birmingham Project’ and ‘Night Coming Tenderly, Black’ show a "focus on historical events and collective memory".
"[31] Published by Yale University Press, and edited by Corey Keller and Elisabeth Sherman, it presents the projects in tandem and includes the poem ‘Dream Variations’ by Langston Hughes as well as accompanying texts by Steven Nelson, Torkwase Dyson, Claudia Rankine and Imani Perry to contextualise Bey’s work historically and thematically.
The exhibition included the film installations '350,000' and 'Evergreen' along with a trilogy of photo series: 'Stony the Road," commissioned by the VMFA, 'In This Here Place' as well as 'Night Coming Tenderly, Black'.