By Dawoud Bey
[Aperture, 2007. 164 pages. $45.00, hardcover]
Reviewed by Audrey Michelle Mast

“For all this rhetoric about ‘leave no child behind,’ I don’t think this society, quite frankly, gives a shit about young people other than as a kind of periodic political football,” says photographer Dawoud Bey in an interview with his former student Carrie Mae Weems in Class Pictures. “I’m trying to construct a kind of representation of the teenage subject that functions in opposition to those representations of teenagers as socially problematic or as engines for a certain consumerism.”

Bey’s prolific body of work is a fascinating progression of ever-new paradigms in portraiture, beginning with his early-’80s series of 35-mm photographs of young African Americans in Brooklyn and Harlem. These elegant, engaging pictures, as Yale University art gallery director Jock Reynolds notes in this book, stand “in stark contrast to the sullen mug shots of black youth being promulgated throughout the mainstream media.” In later work Bey used a 20-by-24 Polaroid camera and richly toned backdrops to create sophisticated diptychs that made his young subjects appear as dramatic and noble as portraits by Dutch master painters.

But Bey himself observes that he does not merely attempt to subvert stereotypical representations of blackness or teenager-hood in general: he does not impose ideas upon his subjects, but rather responds genuinely to the young people themselves during their time together. This is what is so extraordinary about Bey’s Class Pictures: his ability to connect so intimately with such enigmatic subjects. Each of them gazes directly at the camera, some melancholy, others inquisitive, aggressive, or world-weary, but all are utterly engaged with the artist.

The book is the culmination of work produced between 2002 and 2005, as Bey photographed teenagers during a series of artist residencies in urban public high schools around the country, including Chicago, New York, and Detroit, as well as the prestigious, private Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. One can rarely discern whether these students are pictured at Andover or an urban magnet school, as they curl up in a chair or lean against a backdrop of hazy, generic lockers and blackboards. Each plate is accompanied by text written by the students during their shoots, in response to Bey’s prompt: “Tell me something about yourself that you think no one knows.” The answers are alternately funny, poignant, and heartbreaking, and allow not just Bey’s images, but these teenagers, to truly speak for themselves.