Dawoud Bey

September 15, 1963. On this day, in Birmingham. Alabama, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church killed four young African-American girls: Addie Mae Collins, aged fourteen, Denise McNair, aged eleven, Carole Robertson, aged fourteen, and Cynthia Wesley, aged fourteen. Several hours later, two young African-American boys: Johnny Robinson, aged sixteen, and Virgil Ware, aged thirteen, were shot and killed in related violent incidents.

The portraits were made in Birmingham over five months in two locations: the original sanctuary of Bethel Baptist Church and the Birmingham Museum of Art. During the Civil Rights era, Bethel Baptist Church was the heart of The Movement. . . . My second location, the Birmingham Museum of Art, founded in 1951, was for many years a segregated public institution, allowing black visitors only one day a week, on Negro Day. I wanted to use both the communal space of the black church and the public galleries of the formerly segregationist museum as the social and historical context in which to make these photographs. -Dawoud Bey

Curator’s note: Bey took these images in 2014. Each pair of photos includes a portrait of a child who was the same age as one of the 1963 bombing victims, coupled with a portrait of an adult who was the age that child would have been in 2014, had they not been killed.