Dawoud Bey famous quotes

Black people have been killed for directing their gaze at the wrong person. I want my subjects to reclaim their right to look, to see, to be seen.
-- Dawoud Bey

#People #Black #Looks

If done well, I believe the photographic representation of the human subject has the potential to be more revealing than what is revealed by the eye alone, since the human glance is usually a momentary one.
-- Dawoud Bey

#Believe #Eye #Done

I always wanted my photographs to challenge the status quo, to contest the kinds of images that existed in popular culture.
-- Dawoud Bey

#Challenges #Culture #Kind

People say don't stare. Through the photos, not only do I stare, but I allow viewers to stare at the subject, to see things that they cannot see with a casual glance.
-- Dawoud Bey

#People #Casual #Glances

While I have devised various formal strategies for articulating [my] concerns, I think fundamentally the work is driven by a basic curiosity. I seek to find out things about people by making photographs of them.
-- Dawoud Bey

#Thinking #People #Curiosity

Improvisational things about picture-making... learned from working with the small camera early on have served me well in being able to think quickly when making [portraits].
-- Dawoud Bey

#Thinking #Cameras #Portraits

Sara Blair's Harlem Crossroads is an important addition to the body of literature that currently exists about Harlem. It brilliantly illuminates the complex relationship between photographic representation and race, and adds new insight into the ways in which this one black community has figured in both the critical and public imaginations. Harlem Crossroads is a tour de force.
-- Dawoud Bey

#Race #Imagination #Community

God does not so much want us to do things as to let people see what He can do.

We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory.

Major sports are major parts of society. It's not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society.

People who deal with life generously and large-heartedly go on multiplying relationships to the end.

My workday begins around 11 A.M., with a cup of black coffee in each hand. If I had more hands, there would be more coffee.

Millions of tears have fallen for black sons, brothers, lovers, and friends whose assailants took or maimed their lives and then simply went on their way.

Eventually I got the call for 'Iron Man,' and I read sides that had nothing to do with what I did in the movie, and I performed it once while no one was in the room - it was videotaped, and I'm sure Shane Black was watching it from his helicopter or something. And then I got a call the next day that I was going down to shoot it.

The material of typography is the black, and it is the designer’s task with the help of this black to capture space, to create harmonious whites inside the letters as well as between them.

Black smoke, the flickering sister of fire.

I got as much information as I could, so I wouldn't look stupid, but this is a post 9/11 world and there's only so much you can do with the FBI in terms of research.