Dawoud Bey
American, born 1953
Candida and Her Mother, Celia, II
INV-1602
Dawoud Bey
American, born 19531994
Candida and Her Mother, Celia, II
Dawoud Bey American, born 1953 →internal dye diffusion transfer printphotograph
Date
1994
Medium
Internal dye diffusion transfer prints (6)
Dimensions
Each image, approx: 61.4 × 53.2 cm (24 3/16 × 21 in.); each paper, approx: 76.8 × 65.4 cm (30 1/4 × 25 3/4 in.); 79.7 × 59 × 5.7 cm (31 7/16 × 23 1/4 × 2 1/4 in.); each frame: 79.7 × 59.1 × 5.8 cm (31 3/8 × 23 1/4 × 2 1/4 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gladys N. Anderson Endowment
In the dispiriting years just after World War I, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote the famous line: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” We have since gotten used to living with pieces—pieces of time, heritage, even morality. Although Dawoud Bey sometimes seeks a solitary moment or a single point of view in his photographs, he knows that the essence of what lives before the camera often eludes such an approach. Thus, in Candida and Her Mother, Celia, II, he emphasized the complexities of mother-daughter relationships. The grid format of his composition includes frames in which the mother’s and daughter’s faces and hands are captured together, as well as separate frames in which they gaze back at the artist. In the wholesome beauty of this loving family bond, Bey constructed a cohesive sanctuary apart from the horrors and ambiguities of our time.
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