Class Picture Day on Flickr

Groups on Flickr are often hard to seed.  Like a lot of the digital content, an audience does not flock to a website, just because it is published.  It takes a connection with an audience, an innovative or compelling idea, sometimes a bit of luck and great timing or me urging in a blog post.  In our Class Picture Day group, a few IMA staffers (Despi, Noelle, Ruth and Sarah) were brave enough to post their own class photos, to initiate the process.  I was amazed by their commitment to the cause and willingness to put their brilliant pictures from yesteryear online.  I hesitated and used an excuse now echoed by many throughout the halls of the IMA: I can’t find my yearbook.  Come on!

I and others continue to harass our colleagues to submit.  It does take commitment – you have to find a yearbook or the actual photo, you have to scan the image, you have to login to Flickr and upload (you might even need to create a yahoo username to do this) – so I get the time involved.  But, now that even I submitted an image, that excuse is no longer valid.  I uploaded a terribly embarrassing image of myself this morning.  I guess I am committed to the cause and I think you should be too.

As we all age, our class pictures lose that relevance of the pop culture and time period, so when they are viewed years later, well, they appear funny or outdated or slightly embarrassing.  I personally love them.  So I’m challenging our readers, find your Class Picture Day images and post them to our group.  You’ll become part of an online community that was willing to laugh in the face of potential humiliation and just go for it.

Can you do it?

Interview with artist Dawoud Bey
As published in the fall issue of the IMA’s Previews membership magazine

Q. Can you tell us when you became interested in portraiture?
As I began to figure out what I wanted to do as an artist, I was spending a lot of time going to museums and galleries looking at work by other photographers. The pictures that resonated for me most strongly were those that were of human subjects. There seemed to me something quite powerful about a person confronting the camera, returning the attention of the photographer. Early on I was most struck by the photographs by Mike Disfarmer that I saw at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid-70s. I also was struck by Richard Avedon’s show of portraits at Marlboro Gallery around that same time. James Van Der Zee’s photographs had impressed me in the Harlem On My Mind exhibition. I wanted to make photographs that resonated for me the way those photographs had.

Q. How did you begin to focus on photographing teenage students?
Young people became the primary subject of my work in 1992, when I was invited to do a residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Andover. During the eight weeks I was there, I photographed both students at Phillips and students from Lawrence High School, a town a few minutes away. I also worked with the teachers to extend the idea of the portrait into the classroom in other forms, including writings produced by the students. I began to realize how much young people were excluded from the fabric of “the art world” as I knew it and how much their images had been stereotyped in the larger culture over the years. I decided then that I wanted to construct a more complex representation of these young people while also engaging in my own ideas about the photographic object.

Q. Can you talk about how you develop your relationship with the students you work with?
My relationship with the students actually begins while photographing them. I make photographs as a way to find out something about someone. I don’t attempt to develop a relationship and then translate that relationship into a picture; I do my finding out through the camera. All of the pictures in Class Pictures were made by spending two or three weeks in each school. Usually I have only 45 minutes in which to take a student’s photograph, since the student has been released from class in order for me to photograph them. Before making the photograph I ask the student to sit quietly for a few minutes and write something about themselves. Once they are done I make the pictures without reading what they have written. I think if a portrait is well done the viewer is left with a feeling that they have connected to the life of another human being, even though they may be a stranger. The photographs are posed and highly staged, but with an eye towards creating an appearance of informality.

Q. What advice would you give to a young Indianapolis student looking to discover his or her own voice through art?
I would say look at as much art as you can, and make as much art as you can. Never stop looking, and never stop learning. The whole history of art is available to you; it is up to you to know that history and to figure out what you want to contribute to it. Then seek out the training and education that will allow you to accomplish that. And have fun too!

Class Picture Day on Flickr!
In celebration of Bey’s exhibition, we’re inviting you to share your own high school pictures. Artist Dawoud Bey displays statements written by the students alongside the portraits he captures. Be sure to include your own caption.

Submit your class photos, past or present, and we’ll post our favorites here on the IMA Blog!