Now that Polaroid has announced that it will cease manufacturing its instant film in 2009 another death knell has sounded in the world of analog photography. With both the radically changed technological landscape and Polaroid's own habit of being one or two steps behind every possible innovation curve, the end is near for a fundamental tool of photographic practice. This is particularly true if you are one of the many photographers who is making work with a large format camera that you don't manage to keep hooked up to a computer screen via a $5,000-$20,000 digital back in order to actual see what the heck you are photographing. Of course this is highly unlikely for all but those photographers making work in a commercial studio. Using a large format camera without being able to see the results before committing the image to film has always struck me as a rather reckless proposition. How long we will actually have a reasonable selection of films to even commit the image to in the first place is another big question mark looming on the horizon.

I had my first experience chasing the ghost of photography when I was commissioned to do a series of portraits for Art and Auction magazine back in December. The deadline and schedule for making the pictures was daunting enough, requiring me to be in New York every other day for a week as well as the Monday of the final week of photographing (while teaching as well!). Being an end of the year issue just before the holidays, the publication was closing a week earlier than usual, so these pictures had to be made "now" and in the art directors hands (or computer) "yesterday." (Ironically, I was only able to pull this tight travel schedule off because of ATA's daily 6:30 AM flight from Chicago/Midway to New York/LaGuardia, which arrived at 9:00 AM, thus allowing me to schedule my sittings at 10:00 AM. As you may know, first this particular flight and then ATA itself has--like Polaroid--been cancelled.)


Not wanting to be hassled by Fed Exing the film ahead to an unknown location, and having had numerous airport security hassles where security agents want to open up and "inspect" fresh boxes of film, or run this same film through a "safe" x-ray machine (taking it out the lead pouch of course), I decided to spare myself the headache and simply buy all of my film when I got to New York. This was Manhattan after all, Photo Central. Hey, I'm from New York, I know everyplace imaginable to get film...or so I thought. Arriving on the morning of the first sitting, I dropped my fully loaded 80 lb. rolling studio case at my friend's place in the East Village. I then went to get both Fuju 160 Daylight film (4X5 ReadyLoad) and 5-6 boxes of Type 79, Polacolor Pro 100. Strolling down 17th Street on the way to B&H, I realized I had passed the store, and doubled back. Turns out that the store wasn't where I last left it! They had moved uptown. So I jumped in a cab, and rode to midtown. I knew I was in trouble when I saw hardly a familiar blue box in the refrigerators when I got there.


They did have a couple of boxes of the Fuji 160 QuickLoad film, which I realized I better take--quick-- before someone else came into the store. But not a single box of Polaroid, Type 79. They said it had been on order "forever," and they had no idea when they were getting anymore in. No problem. I figured I'd head back downtown to Calumet. Surely Calumet is never out of film. Well, you know what happened when I got to Calumet. Not a single box there either. And they had no idea when they would get any. They didn't even remember the last time they had gotten any. I'm starting to get nervous now. I walk from Calumet a couple of blocks over to Adorama. None. I walk to 23rd Street thinking Duggal, the color large lab I had worked with in NY, might have some in their refrigerators at the front counter. None. Bob Kapoor there didn't remember the last time he had seen any. I figure I'm on West 23rd Street and maybe K&M on East 23rd Street has some, since they are just down the block from the School of Visual Arts, and I remember we all used to get our film there when I was a student at SVA years ago. None. K&M suggested the large photo supplier on 17th Street and Park Avenue South. I used to buy film there all the time, and so I jumped in a cab and headed over there. I thought the place looked a little dark as I got out of the cab. Sure enough, they had gone out of business! Walking east on 17th Street I looked for a few of the small labs that used to dot the area, most of whom also used to stock film as well. The first one I encountered someone was actually--I kid you not--standing up in the window scraping the name of the business off of the glass with a blade. Ultimately I settled for a box of Polaroid black and white 100 film, making a mental note to bring some of my now slightly dated Type 79 that I had stacked up in my studio back in Chicago next time out. I did manage to make it to the first scheduled sitting with a few minutes to spare.


I had started using Polaroid Type 55 P/N film in the late 80s when I first began using a 4X5 camera (see photograph above) to make portraits in the streets of Brooklyn and other black communities. In the early 90s I started working with the 20X24 Polaroid View Camera in the New York studio, and later in the studio in Boston. I then began a period of shipping the camera to various locations around the country, from Atlanta, to Columbus and Cleveland, OH among other places. I also had the one in Prague brought to London on the back of a pickup truck, where I then set up a studio in the National Portrait Gallery (see photo left). Ultimately I worked with that camera exclusively for almost ten years. Throughout that entire time there was always a looming threat hanging over the camera and Polaroid's support of the 20X24 studio. I never thought the company maximized any of the public relations potential of the large camera and the artists and photographers who used it. I don't even know that the suits and engineering geeks who ran Polaroid even cared about or understood any of that work anyway. Barbara Hitchcock was (and is) the sole guardian and advocate for the studio and the creative use of Polaroid's material. She's still there, and I believe the amazing collection they amassed over the years of work made with Polaroid materials is still there as well. But as far as photography goes, it seems Polaroid is about to sever its last meaningful link to the field.

There's talk of Fuji taking over the production of instant film, but this remains to be seen. Some photographers like Timothy Greenfield Sanders have stockpiled the film, with Greenfield Sanders having gone out and brought five thousand dollars worth. I can tell him it's a losing proposition, since I have kept my dated Polaroid film under optimum conditions for several years. It eventual shifts then dries out no matter what. Rest in peace Polaroid.

Photographs (from top): 'A Girl Wearing School Medals,' 1989 © Dawoud Bey; photograph by Chris Dorley Brown
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Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts.
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On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett. Both Rivera and Catlett were artists who were unabashedly forthright in their adherence to the cause of social justice, and equally as forthright in their adherence to practicing at the highest level of of their respective art forms.
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Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact. As the economy has taken a downturn lately public institutions have begun to think about the ways in which they do or do not engage that larger audience that their very survival depends upon.
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The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music's most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field.
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Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement.
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John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.
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A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world. Such was the impact of this show on me that almost every other exhibition I saw both before and after in those three days came to feel almost meaningless, like so much empty, aestheticized and useless decoration.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree. The feeling of well earned and shared accomplishment was palpable walking amongst the families of the graduates, and I was reminded yet again of the hard work and sacrifice that these moments are invested with.
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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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