When: closing April 21, 2019
In 2005, the photographer Dawoud Bey traveled to Birmingham, Alabama to see if he could create a work to commemorate the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. He spent a lot of time in Birmingham, getting to know many people there.
In 2012, he created a series of paired portraits. In each pair, there is a young person, the same age as the children who were murdered (either in the bombing itself or in the violence that raged afterwards) and a person the same age as those children would be now, had they lived.
His goal was to make the victims less of an abstraction and reveal their humanity. Because it's a lot harder to look away from actual human suffering than it is to look away from statistics.
In the second room is a video he created that is also in two parts. One is a drive through Birmingham in a car, with the camera placed at a child's viewpoint. The other is a camera moving through various locations: a lunch counter, a barbershop. The music, composed by Bey's son, is haunting.
Verdict: This is a very small show - only two rooms, but it's a show worth seeing.
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