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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Daward studied first at the School of Visual Arts in New York and later at the Empire State College in Saratoga Springs in New York and at Yale University School of Art in New Haven in Connecticut.
Even as he finished his studies at the School of Visual Arts in 1976, he'd begun his first major project, the multi-year series Harlem USA.
Completed in 1979 when it was shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
A text Daward wrote for that exhibition describes the series as a homecoming of sorts, since his parents had met in Harlem and he'd visited friends and family there throughout his life.
Importantly, he'd also seen Harlem on My Mind, a controversial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1969 that famously excluded the work of black photographers.
Harlem
Harlem USA then was deeply personal in returning to a place of memory and sentimental meaning, but also political in asserting the importance of the vision of African American artists in framing a majority black neighbourhood.
Doward immersed himself in Harlem and chronicled intimate encounters with individuals and more public events like block parties.
The series is an objective documentation of a specific place at a particular time, but also a subjective research.
Response to people and communities with whom he'd forged relationships.
Doward's sensitive approach to his subjects was embodied in his street portraits, photographs of African-American individuals and couples made between 1988 and 1991.
Each of the subjects looks directly at the camera and thus at us as we gaze at them.
This was crucial, since, as Doward put it, it created an exchange that didn't always take place in the social world.
World and extended the subject's presence into spaces where a black image was seldom seen.
In a similarly ambitious multi-year project, Class Pictures, first shown in 2007, he went to several schools in the US and took images of a diverse array of students.
Before he photographed them, he asked them to write an autobiographical text, and the edited writings accompany the photographs wherever they're shown.
Together, they add up to a rich portrait.
Of young people that consciously avoids generalizations made about them when looking through a lens of social problematics, as Daward has expressed it.
His next major series was the aforementioned Birmingham Project, completed in 2012.
The final works are diptychs that depict young African Americans who, when Daud photographed them, were the age that the six victims of the Birmingham bombing were when they died.
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