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Reimagining a Tragedy, 50 Years Later

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As a youngster living in Queens, the photographer Dawoud Bey was traumatized by a picture he encountered in a civil rights photography book. In the stark black-and-white image, a 12-year-old African-American girl, Sarah Jean Collins, lies severely wounded in a hospital bed, her eyes covered by bandages. Blinded in one eye, Ms. Collins was one of the survivors of the deadly bombing by white supremacists of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., on Sept. 15, 1963.

The photograph has gripped Mr. Bey for the nearly five decades since he first saw it. It has taken him that long to create a response to it. With “The Birmingham Project,” an exhibition of large-scale diptychs and a video at the Birmingham Museum of Art, his response has found its form, in time to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombing on Sunday.

Six children died on that day, including four girls in the blast, which occurred as they prepared for Sunday school: Denise McNair, 11, and Addie Mae Collins (Sarah Jean’s sister), Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14. Two boys were killed in related incidents: Virgil Ware, 13, gunned down by a white teenager as he rode his bicycle, and Johnny Robinson, 16, shot by the police, reportedly as he fled after throwing stones at a car where white teenagers hurled taunts and waved a Confederate flag.

Mr. Bey’s diptychs pair a present-day youngster the same age as one of the murdered children with men and women the ages the boys and girls would be if they were alive today. “I wanted to give tangible and palpable physical presence to the young people martyred that day,” he said. “While the horror of the day is clear, the actual identities of the young people have become abstracted in a fuzzy and mythic kind of way.”

The five-month process of finding his subjects was arduous. They not only had to be the right age but also live in Birmingham. Mr. Bey reached out widely in the black community, soliciting volunteers on Craigslist, through word of mouth, fliers and schools visits, and by enlisting the aid of local ministers. At the invitation of Birmingham’s mayor, William A. Bell, Mr. Bey spoke about the project and the need for subjects at a meeting of the City Council.

“The specificity of the ages made it that much more difficult,” he said. “The outreach continued even while I was making the photographs.”

Typical of his process, Mr. Bey, who teaches photography at Columbia College Chicago, maintained full control over the aesthetics of his images, but worked collaboratively with his subjects, talking with them, assuring that they were comfortable and allowing them to choose their clothes, hairstyles and accessories.

Dawoud Bey, all rights reserved Trentin Williams and Willie Robinson.

The portraits are set in two locations: the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Bethel Baptist Church. During the 1960s, African-American admission to the museum was restricted to one day a week â€" Negro Day, as it was called. The church, headquarters for the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, played a central role in the civil rights movement.

The unrelated sitters, paired only after all of the portraits were completed, share uncannily similar expressions and body language. “The decisions about which individual photographs to place together,” Mr. Bey said, “had to do with how they related in a number of different ways, whether gestural or expressive, through disposition or some other personal aspect that would make each resonate more forcefully in relation to the other.”

This resonance intensifies the poignancy and emotional impact of the diptychs. Despite the half-century that separates them, the paired subjects speak to intermingled histories and shared destinies: adults who helped forge a path of acceptance and stability for African-Americans; the young beneficiaries of their bravery and largess who may well do the same for future generations.

Dawoud Bey, all rights reserved Maxine Adams and Amelia Maxwell.

This is but one of the legacies lost to the children who died, and one of the heartbreaking implications of the tragedy that Mr. Bey helps us grasp. His imagery transcends the limitations of social history, which usually ignores the human dimension of its nonfamous victims. “The Birmingham Project” aims to restore their humanity and to underscore what has been lost.

Mr. Bey’s video, “9.15.63,” further humanizes this story. Filmed in Birmingham, it evokes a quiet Sunday morning. In split screen, it juxtaposes a slow-motion pan of trees, the tops of buildings, lampposts and electrical poles, shot from below and framed by blue sky, with the interior details of businesses, like hair dryer hoods, a row of razors and clippers, or stools.

These placid spaces, devoid of people, resonate with history, alluding to the beauty parlors, barbershops and lunch counters that facilitated African-American activism and resistance. As the video concludes, with children’s drawings hanging in a classroom counterpoised with the exterior of the 16th Street Baptist Church, it brings us back to the tragedy. We realize that its outdoor footage is shot from the perspective of the four girls as they made their way to church that day.

The power of “The Birmingham Project,” and Mr. Bey’s work in general, resides in its ability to draw us into the issues it raises through work that is beautiful and visually compelling. It is in this sense that he collaborates not just with his subjects but also with the viewer.

By transforming an epochal story into a flesh and blood reality, “The Birmingham Project” invites us to reflect on the consequences of a historic crime, and, through images of contemporary Americans who are no different from us, to examine our personal relationship to it. Identifying with the surrogates of six martyrs â€" young and old â€" we better comprehend, and feel, the magnitude of their loss: innocent childhoods obliterated in a violent flash, a half-century of wisdom learned and milestones achieved that would never be.

“The Birmingham Project” will be on view at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Ala., through Dec. 2.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York.

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