The Artist Project: Dawoud Bey

Photographer Dawoud Bey reflects on Roy DeCarava in this episode of The Artist Project.

December 7, 2015

3 min. watch

From March 2015 to June 2016, we invited 120 artists—local, national, and global—to choose individual works of art or galleries that sparked their imaginations. In this online series, artists reflect on what art is, what inspires them from across 5,000 years of art, and in so doing, they reveal the power of a museum and The Met.

"His deeper contribution was as an African American artist who took that piece of himself out into the world and brought that into his work."

Dawoud Bey reflects on the photographs of Roy DeCarava in this episode of The Artist Project—an online series in which artists respond to works of art in The Met collection.

About the Artist
Dawoud Bey, born in 1953, is an American photographer renowned for his large-scale portraits.

Black and white photograph of a blues singer on the street

Dawoud Bey (American, born New York, 1953)

The Blues Singer, 1976, printed 1979

Gelatin silver print; 5 15/16 × 8 15/16 in. (15.1 × 22.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2013 (2013.112) © Dawoud Bey