Dawoud Bey at Emory University

Distinguished American photographer Dawoud Bey has a show up now in the Visual Arts Gallery at Emory University entitled the Emory Project, through March 5th, 2011. This show, which consists of some 20 double portraits of members of the Emory community, documents the diversity of people who work or study at Atlanta's most distinguished university.  

Bey's overall project also includes a web presence that includes over twice as many images as the actual on-site show in Atlanta.

The Emory Visual Arts Department commissioned Bey to develop this series of portraits as a way to celebrate the end of a five-year project to explore Emory's historic and current experiences of race, gender, sexuality and other forms of human difference. He made the work while serving as Artist-in-Residence at Emory in the spring of 2010.

Bey was born and grew up in New York City; he is now based in Chicago. So how does he wind up on this blog, devoted as it is to Southern fine art photography? 

Well, the people he photographed live or study in the South, and the show is in the South. And, in the end, given his subject matter and his approach to it, one could make the case that in spite of his places of origin and residence, he's a Southerner, too.