INDIANAPOLIS.- The Indianapolis Museum of Art will host an exhibition of photographic portraits of high school students by Dawoud Bey beginning this September. Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey will feature 40 intimate photographs of young adults accompanied by their own autobiographical statements. The exhibition is on view at the IMA through November 21, 2008, in the IMA’s McCormack Forefront Galleries.

“Teenagers are often depicted in the media either as vehicles for consumerism or in terms of social or behavioral problems. Bey’s project strives to reveal the individuality of teenagers in a way that is respectful and non-condescending,” explained Sarah Urist Green, assistant curator of contemporary art at the IMA. “His portraits show that teenagers can display remarkable complexity and strength.”

Believing that teens are often marginalized in our culture, Bey worked in close collaboration with high school students across the country to create these descriptive portraits. The students met and spoke with Bey before agreeing to be photographed and then wrote personal accounts to be displayed with their photographs. Asked to share something about themselves that others might not know, the students wrote “anything and everything”—baby stories, why blue is their favorite color, goals for the future, and descriptions of dealing with stereotypes and deaths. The statements are alternately touching, funny or harrowing, deepening appreciation for the challenges young adults face in the 21st century. Bey did not read his subjects’ statements until after he photographed them.

In his own words, Bey hopes “to create a compelling and significant contemporary portrait of American youth in its various social and human dimensions. I believe that such a group of photographs—with the attendant texts—will constitute a significant record and examination of our time…Rather than viewing young people through a lens of social problematics that generalizes the individual, I intend to make a rich and complex description of these subjects.”

Inspired by street portraiture, Bey began the Class Pictures project in 2002 by photographing students at three south side Chicago high schools. This exhibition highlights students from a variety of economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds drawn from both public and private high schools in Detroit; Lawrence and Andover; Massachusetts; Orlando; San Francisco; and New York City.

After spending about three weeks at each school, Bey amassed around 20 portraits from each school before beginning again in another area. With funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, Bey completed the work in 2006.

In addition to the Class Pictures photographs, a video by Bey titled Four Stories will be on view in the McCormack Forefront Galleries. For this work, Bey took video footage of four students from very close range, focusing on the subjects’ faces, as they shared personal stories.

Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey will be on view at the IMA from September 25 though November 21. The exhibition is organized by the Aperture Foundation. The exhibition is sponsored by the Penrod Society.

About Dawoud Bey - Dawoud Bey received his undergraduate degree at Empire State College in 1990 and his Master’s in Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art in 1993. He has taught photography at Columbia College Chicago and Empire State College and has assisted in art instruction at various colleges including Rutgers University.

Bey’s portraits have been featured in solo exhibitions at such venues as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Queens Museum of Art, NY; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH. He has also been included in group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and the Art Institute of Chicago among many others.

About the Forefront Series - Forefront, an ongoing series of exhibitions that presents recent contemporary art by international artists in the 4,000-square-foot McCormack Forefront Galleries, offers a constantly changing view of major developments in the art world. Past Forefront exhibitions have included: Ingrid Calame: The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Project; Emily Kennerk: Suburban Nation; AfroCuba Works on Paper; Amy Cutler; and Ernesto Neto.