About the Birmingham series (2014):

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.

When I was eleven years old, I saw for the first time the published photograph of a wounded Sarah Collins. Sarah was also in the church, but unlike her older sister, Addie Mae, had survived. I trace the beginning of this work to seeing that picture in a 1964 book called The Movement. The photograph showed Sarah, a vulnerable black girl, badly wounded, her eyes covered in heavy bandages, lying in a hospital bed soon after the explosion. Everything changed for me at that moment, and it has taken all of these intervening years to craft a response to the ground-shifting personal drama of seeing that picture. I didn’t know it would take fifty years (including seven years of repeated trips to Birmingham) in order to come to terms with what that response might be and how I might give tangible and expressive shape to it ̶but that is indeed how long the project has been unfolding.

Birmingham: Four Girls, Two Boys asks that we, the viewer, consider the past through the present. This is my memorial to those six young lives lost fifty years ago, and a tribute to the community of people who were in Birmingham at that traumatic moment and to those born there since that fateful day. Finally, this project bears witness to the resilience of members of Birmingham’s current African-American community, who are both the subject of and the subjects in these photographs.

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. Pastored by the activist minister, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Bethel was the site of the formation of the Alabama Christian Freedom Movement, which later became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the primary organizations of the Civil Rights 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 formerly segregationist museum as the social and historical context in which to make these photographs.

—Dawoud Bey, artist