By Michelle Grabner, October 10, 2025
The photographic series Syracuse, 1985 closely follows Dawoud Bey’s landmark Harlem, U.S.A. (1975–1979) which captured the psychological vividness of Black identity in the historic Manhattan neighborhood. An invitation to Syracuse’s Light Work Residency in 1985—providing Bey with a workspace, materials, and technical support—resulted in the Syracuse photographs, a formalized examination of a city and its public in social and economic flux.
Woman Alone at the Bus Stop (1985) epitomizes this body of work, negotiating street-level retail architecture, raking light, and a single young Black Woman who vertically anchors the composition near its center. Here, as in many of the images in the series, Bey underscores the palpable tension between a waiting, folded-arm figure—manifesting la mélancolie—and the harsh, planar urban environment that he crops deliberately at street level, withholding spatial distance or atmosphere.
The exhibition features thirty-one vintage silver gelatin prints installed across the gallery’s discontinuous walls. Some works are clustered in loose thematic sets—figures smoking, compositions including children—yet unlike Bey’s earlier work, this series is not primarily a collection of portraits emphasizing individuality, style, or presence. Syracuse instead documents the daily rhythms of bodies negotiating late-twentieth-century urban life. Race, class, and everyday existence play out on sidewalks, at bus stops, in front of retail stores, and within places of worship. Few details in these photographs tie the series specifically to Syracuse; similar urban landscapes—shaped by deindustrialization, migration, racial segregation, and 1970s urban renewal projects—could just as easily have existed in Rochester, Detroit, or Toledo.
The abstracting qualities achieved through severe cropping reach an extreme in two photographs. In A Man Bending Over (1985), an out-of-focus close-up of a man’s shoulder, biceps, and forearm occupies the entire left third of the image. The right half captures an older white man bending over, facing the opposite direction. The back contour of the bending man mirrors the shape of the arm, establishing a lateral symmetry reinforced by a hard architectural corner dividing the figures. The white shirt sleeve bisecting the brawny Black arm corresponds to the belt that separates the patterned shirt and sagging pants of the older man. The organizational conceit of this photograph delights in its balance of contrasts: old and young, Black and white, standing in opposition while sharing a similar profile and a city corner.
A Woman Alone at the Bus Stop (1985) operates on a similar principle, juxtaposing two basic elements: a brightly illuminated figure—small and delicately positioned in the middle ground, her stark white turtleneck blown out—set against an extreme close-up of a bus dominating the right half of the image. Opposites are at work here too: the steel bus, with its mechanical side-view mirror, windshield wiper, and round headlights, evokes the engine power of industry, dwarfing the solitary woman who stands waiting on the sidewalk, reading a book and holding her purse. The extreme foregrounding of the vehicle’s grill reduces her scale to that of the bus’s side-mirror. Sunlight flattens and elongates the shadows, compressing the three planes that organize the composition—the bus face, the sidewalk, and the architectural façade. While the structural elements are few, the implications of their dissimilarity—human versus machine, stillness versus motion, intimacy versus industrial scale—are vast.
Across this series, Bey accentuates the formal potency of composition, value contrast, shape, and geometry. While these strategies may temper the viewer’s empathetic connection to the human subjects, they sharpen the sense of alienation embedded in street-level life—lives predominantly composed of middle-class service workers and the unemployed. Bey’s Syracuse photographs depict urban spaces occupied out of necessity rather than leisure. His figures embody l’ennui as the languor of waiting for public transit, passing time amid a city shaped by industrial decline. Forty years on, these photographs feel newly confounding, precisely because it has become difficult to witness boredom or stillness in public, as our handheld screens distract us from the social and economic realities that pattern our movements. In that way, Bey’s Syracuse, 1985 series feels more urgent now than even his acclaimed collaborative portraits.
Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator and critic. She is a Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her critical writing is regularly published in Artforum.
DAWOUD BEY "A Girl and Two Women Reading, Syracuse, NY" 1985.
DAWOUD BEY "A Girl Sweeping at McDonald's, Syracuse, NY" 1985.
DAWOUD BEY "A Woman Alone at the Bus Stop, Syracuse, NY" 1985.