The Chicago Project

by Dawoud Bey, Stephanie Smith, Jacqueline Terrassa

Is it possible for a photographic portrait to reveal anything "real" about its subject? As part of a twelve-week residency at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, acclaimed photographer Dawoud Bey asked this question of twelve teenagers from nearby schools. This fully illustrated book unpacks the process of Bey's ambitious residency and its products: a major exhibition pairing Bey's portraits of each student with audio portraitscreated by award-winning radio producers Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister, as well as an exhibition of portraits curated by the students themselves.

Genres: Art, Photography

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Dawoud Bey (New York, 1953) has for decades made groundbreaking and evocative work about the histories of Black communities. His numerous honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. A major career retrospective of his work, An American Project, was co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020–22). Bey holds a master of fine arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently professor of art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. His books include Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Seeing Deeply (2018), Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities (Aperture, 2019), and Street Portraits (2021).