Juxtapoz Magazine – An American Project: Dawoud Bey’s Latest Show @ SFMoMA

“A wonderfully unnerving moment” is how Dawoud Bey responds to SFMOMA’s Curator of Photography Corey Keller’s question about what it feels like to be an actively working artist currently having a retrospective. “I’m working on a project in Lousiana, thinking of the work in front of me, work I have yet to do. Then a situation comes that demands you stop and look back, though as an artist you are looking forward. I tend not to stop, but I’m called to stop again and reflect on the past. That’s the unnerving piece.” The current exhibition showcases over eighty pieces from eight major series made over the course of more than forty years by the African American artist whose goal is to make photographs with a “real sense of interiority, to go beneath the surface.”