Ben Luke
speaker
1,919 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 1 Sep
Ben Luke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Hello, I'm Ben Luke, and welcome to A Brush With, the podcast from the Art newspaper, in which I talk to artists about their influences from writers to musicians and of course other artists, and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work.
And this episode is a brush with Doward Bay, whose photographs and film installations address the experience of black people in the US from the horrors of slavery via racist violence and civil rights.
Era to intimate moments in contemporary life.
He began his career as a photographer in the 1970s with the consistent aim to work as an artist rather than a photojournalist.
While he was celebrated from the start for his depictions of people and communities, he's always had a particular sensitivity to place, and after several decades in which portraiture and street photography were dominant strains in his practice, his work over the past decade has focused mostly on life.
Landscape, but even when they're not physically present, those who have lived in and travelled through the places he depicts are as much part of the photographs and films subject as the environments captured by his camera.
He said of recent series, for instance, that he wants to capture the landscape as seen and felt by the enslaved people who move through it, and a profound sense of empathy underpins all his output.
This notion of the radical black imaginary.
He explains, is the foundation or place that my work springs from.
Doward was born David Edward Smickel in New York in 1953, but changed his name in the early 1970s.
His parents were from Harlem, but he grew up in Jamaica in Queens, New York.
He vividly remembers seeing the Movement, documentary of a struggle for equality, a civil rights photography book with text by the playwright Lorraine Hansbury as an 11-year-old.
Amid many horrific images in it was a photograph by Frank Dandridge of a young girl, Sarah Jean Collins, who was a survivor of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.
A racist attack by the Ku Klux Klan that killed four young girls and two young boys.
Sarah Jean was the sister of one of the girls who died.
Years later, Dawood remembered this photograph of Sarah Jean with.
Bandages over both eyes, and it prompted his series The Bermium Project, completed in 2012.
Showing 521–540 of 1,919 · page 27 of 96
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