在他的教母给他送给他教父的相机之前，达沃德·贝伊（Dawoud Bey）确定自己的未来与木棍和鼓工的伸展膜不安。在过去的半个世纪中，Bey为自己担任顶级摄影师创造了一个空间。但是当被问及他的作品时，他将视觉艺术转向音乐。

69岁的贝说：“约翰·科尔特兰（John Coltrane）是我持久的影响力，人们问我的第一个创造性影响力是谁。我不必考虑。我将约翰·科尔特兰（John Coltrane）作为艺术家的演变，雄心勃勃的水平越来越多，改变了音乐的形状。……你去。”

Coltrane’s path — from bebop accompanist to band leader to wildly progressive music-related spiritual seeker — was one followed by Bey through a different medium. Bey gave up the drumsticks for that camera that was given to him. As a teen in the late ’60s, he witnessed a formative exhibition in New York, “Harlem on My Mind.” Then Bey took his interests and influences and cut a path without precedent that — a half century later — remains vibrant for the way it stitches together old and new, history and the way it is curated, as well as news, culture and our complicated present.

Drummers do more than keep the time. They move the music forward with embellishments and nudges toward new directions. Bey’s abandoned craft clearly works through his art as a photographer. “Dawoud Bey: An American Project” — which opened this weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — captures Bey’s development as an artist, from Harlem portraits and candids snapped in the early 1970s through pieces that suggest a bracing vision about life, time and America.

历史重新审视

从哪里开始这个非凡的展览？它实际上是从一开始就开始的，第一张照片是贝伊在1970年代初在哈林人拍摄的。但是像科尔特兰（Coltrane）一样，贝伊（Bey）并没有遵循一条线性路径。展览讲述了一个故事，但它通过随着时间的流逝而曲折而曲折。这个关于Bey的作品的首发景象的总体叙述。在展览的结尾可以看到他的最新照片，其中包括在纽约或旧金山没有放映的几部作品，这是MFAH成为这次Bey作品之旅的第三站而获得的奖励。

这些来自他“在此处的地方”系列中的最新照片是Bey创造的叙事中令人着迷的一部分。在一个看来，似乎感到轻松而不是看到它的贝伊（Bey）在路易斯安那州棚屋的一扇敞开的门侧面捕捉了一丝阳光。在门上最不可见的飞机中，这架飞机可能是观看它的人的第三个最低的可见：水平的一面通常会靠在jamb上。Bey的照片将其注入绘画质地。这片门的滑动爆炸到了前景，周围有阴影。靠进去，尽管是一张照片，但看起来越来越像一幅画。

鉴于Bey对自己的手艺采取了复杂的方法，因此如此小的细节是有道理的。抚养画家和贝伊灯光。我问了他的肖像画，贝伊（Bey）对某些人的观察感到温暖，那就是有些人可能充满了外围风格和黑暗的感觉。

他说：“卡拉瓦乔很大。”“就图形的表达而言，光和阴影的戏剧性使用……’

省长笑着说。“每当我一些portraits, I would keep moving the light around until it had what I called ‘enough Caravaggio’ without being overly dramatic. His work is something I’ve assimilated as part of my own language.”

MFAH摄影策展人马尔科姆·丹尼尔（Malcolm Daniel）说：“您可以从规模和调色板中看到，他知道旧的主画的作品。”

Making the old new

贝说，“美国项目”中代表的50年代表了特定的进化。像Coltrane一样，他吸收了自己的经历，然后寻找使其新的方法。

Bey’s Harlem portraits from the early- and mid-1970s grab the eye: a child in oversize sunglasses leaning on a table with outsize confidence in front of a theater. An older Black man in a bowler hat and bow tie breaks his sartorial perfection to lean his arm on a stoop. Bey won’t diminish these images, and they remain powerful in capturing time and place. But they’re also the earliest point in the flow of time and history for him. They’re his first known works. He’d use them as a point of entry to look deeper into the history of America and African people in America. He also sought to find ways to liberate photography from being a shutter-click away from time and place.

Bey’s work is a river in reverse, it turns out. He started shooting around his neighborhood. But then he wanted to dig deeper, to pull threads of history and region and see where they led.

“An American Project” leads viewers past any single image.

“Musicians were a model for me, in terms of how one continues forward while reinventing oneself,” he says.

So the Harlem portraits that open the exhibition lead to different collections Bey shot.

With Bey, the works on display represent an artist who knows his medium trying to push how it can be applied to the language of the form. One gallery includes photographs of students who allowed themselves to be presented on film, and their short summaries of self are included with the images.

Another series finds Bey building single images from multiple independent photographs. He shot natives of Birmingham, Ala., who were the same age as the children killed in the 1963 church bombing. And he shot children more recently who were the same age. He found commonalities between the elderly and the young. If a photograph is a moment in time, unwavering, Bey managed to rupture the idea of a photograph’s frame as indelibly locked in time.

“我们考虑照片中的照片here和now,” he says. “What about the然后? How do you do that?”

他超越了时间，找到了一种将过去和现在融合成一件艺术品的方法。

Light and dark

贝伊将“夜晚的夜晚来，黑色”描述为创造“技术技巧行为”的尝试。这些图像喃喃自语，但它们是在白天拍摄的，Light Lent Lent Bey的照片他想要的各种质地。

If his portraits carry the whispers of Caravaggio, these photographs, together in a gallery room, create a meditative mood akin to that of Rothko Chapel. They’re dark and full of shadows and open to interpretation as light hits different parts of them. Almost every image exists with various gradations of negative space. Like the Rothko Chapel canvases, they invite quiet contemplation. Unlike the chapel’s giant canvases, they’re designed to prompt a more agitated reflection.

Bey shot these landscapes around northern Ohio, spaces along the Underground Railroad. There’s no replicating specific spots along the flights of enslaved people. So Bey went to places near where former enslaved people traveled in hopes of finding freedom.

他用所有尖锐的质地捕捉了无情的景观，这些质地会拖着那些寻求自由的人的肉体和衣服：树林和the木。

“I wanted to imagine a passage through that landscape,” he says.

Creeks and other bodies of water, Bey points out, were valuable because they’d end the trail for dogs tracking the scent of runaway enslaved people.

“I’m more about the materials and the medium and the imagine to evoke those moments,” Bey says.

Looking back, looking ahead

The MFAH presentation of “Dawoud Bey: An American Project” benefited from a series of pandemic-derived cancellations, one of those fortunate gets for Houston because of the pandemic. “We were so lucky to be a part of this,” Daniel says.

He points out that the MFAH received some additional works because of timing. Because the show already visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, Houston benefits from several photographs from “In This Here Place,” Bey’s series from 2019 and 2020 from various plantations in Louisiana.

他与画家的联系显而易见，尤其是贝伊（Bey）看到光线的方式。

在完成了路易斯安那州的系列赛之后，贝伊现在沿着弗吉尼亚州里士满的一条奴隶小径射击，贝伊说：“是奴隶制基础设施的中心。”

通过一个镜头，BEY在反向工作了50年。他从1970年代开始在纽约拍摄“黑人”的礼物。他继续肖像画，同时还试图找到方法使摄影讲述事实之后的美国历史故事。Bey说，下一个项目应该给整个历史项目带来完整感。”

He sees this exhibition as representing “these issues through my chosen field of engagement. Some folks engage in other ways. Working through museums, that’s how I participate in that. I hope people come to engage in conversations.”

andrew.dansby@chron.com