Made up of large-scale photographic portraits as well as a 15-minute accompanying video, Bey’s images for “The Birmingham Project” on the 50th anniversary of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that claimed the lives of 4 girls and then 2 boys in related violence were shot over a period of five months at two locations in Birmingham: the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Bethel Baptist Church, the site of earlier white supremacist violence. The artist’s subjects are children of the same age as the 1963 victims, and adults 50 years older – the very age the innocents would be had they survived. Seated in chairs or church pews, composed symmetrically and facing the camera directly, Bey arranged his portraits into diptychs. The images are, at once, poignant, poetic and plainspoken, while conflating time past and time present.
As Christian Viveros-Fauné observed in a 2014 review, several among the diptychs “stand out for the sharp commonalities and contrasts he elicited from the sitters’ attitudes and clothing. One male duo [this image] does more than simply point up the expected gulf between youth and experience. A mismatch between the sartorial innocence of a wide-striped rugby shirt and a world-weary fedora, these two strangers reveal an intimacy that grows as the viewer considers the tricky passage of African-American manhood—there’s the well-trod span between youthful cockiness, on the one hand, and confidence, suspicion, and fatigue, on the other.”
