Dawoud Bey

Timothy Huffman and Ira Sims

On September 15th, 1963 members of the Ku Klux Klan blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama using dynamite. Four African American girls were killed, and 22 other people were injured. Two African American boys were killed in related violence that day. No prosecutions were pursued until 1977 when one member of the Klan was convicted for first-degree murder. In 2001 and 2002 two other men were further convicted. The bombing of this church marked a turning point in the struggle for civil rights and contributed to support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 2005 American photographer Dawoud Bey visited Birmingham Alabama to research the possibility of commemorating this terrible event. He spent the next seven years meeting people in the community and in 2012 began a series of paired portraits of members of the church community. Each pair depicts a young person of the age of those killed in 1963 and a person of the age those children would have been fifty years later in 2013. Bey’s photographs make immediately apparent the loss of four young lives and the passage of stolen time, while at the same time highlighting issues of on-going racism and violence against the African American population; Bey began this project the same year that Tryvon Martin was killed. Half of the photographs were taken at the Bethel Baptist Church and the other half at the Birmingham Museum of Art, an institution that restricted admission to African Americans to once a week through the early 1960s. In one of the 16 diptychs Timothy Huffman and Ira Sims are photographed in the museum in front of Rococo paintings by Christophe Huet from circa 1750 depicting picnic scenes with coffee and hot chocolate being served by monkeys, a code for African slaves. The contrast between the frivolity of the scene and the racist message with the seriousness of the sitters and the reason for their depiction is significant.