Between 1988 and 1991, Dawoud Bey photographed African Americans encountered on the streets of several American cities. Street Portraits, published by MACK in 2021, gathers this sustained body of work around a precise question: what can a public portrait become when the person before the camera is invited not merely to be observed, but to determine how they will appear?

Bey worked with a tripod-mounted large-format camera and a positive/negative Polaroid material that produced both an immediate print and a reusable negative. The apparatus slowed the encounter and made portrait-making conspicuous rather than furtive. His subjects posed, presenting themselves within the urban environment while meeting the camera with expressions that range from guardedness to warmth, assurance, and introspection. The street remains visible as social space, yet each sitting briefly establishes another kind of space—one shaped jointly by photographer and subject.

Reciprocity was built into Bey’s method. After making a portrait, he gave the participant a small black-and-white Polaroid print. This gesture returned an image to the person who had helped create it and distinguished the project from traditions in which photographers simply extract pictures from public life. The resulting photographs resist racial stereotype not by substituting a single corrective image, but by allowing Black subjects to appear with individual psychological presence and complexity.

An essay by Greg Tate accompanies the photographs. For collectors attentive to portraiture, Black representation, and the ethics of photographic encounter, the book merits consideration as a concentrated account of Bey’s working method over four years. Its significance lies in the conjunction of formal deliberation and social exchange: large-format precision, self-presentation, and the tangible return of the Polaroid print all belong to the meaning of the portraits, not merely to their production history.