New portrait series focuses on high school students

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Getting your class picture taken in high school always was made out to be a big deal. Students made sure to wear their best clothes, style their hair just the right way and give a big grin for the camera.

The portraits on display at Kresge Art Museum are much different than these we reminisce about.

Opening last Saturday, the new exhibit at Kresge Art Museum, Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey, showcases large portraits of high school students at their most vulnerable and most powerful.

The portraits include a range of students from several different racial, economic and cultural backgrounds inside of school buildings.

Subjects strike their most serious and transparent demeanor as they stare directly into the camera, inviting the viewer to engage.

Accompanying the photos are short autobiographies of the students that add another dimension to the images.

“Up until this project, I’ve been allowing the photograph to carry the full narrative weight,” Bey said.

“I think there is more that you don’t know, when looking at a photograph, than you do know and I wanted to, for the first time, bring that information that you can’t know from a picture into the construct of the project — to bring the visual representation and the self-representation together.”

It’s a strategy Northview High School student Nick Polzin admired.

“There’s more to these people than what meets the eye,” Polzin said.

“You wouldn’t really know these people unless you were friends with them or unless you asked them.”

Bey’s exhibit has the ability to reconstruct stereotypes people have of teenagers because many of the stories and emotions the students expressed in their autobiographies show deep thought and intelligence.

“I’m a teenager. I’m only in high school. I don’t like to be labeled as, ‘oh, he’s a teenager so he’s going to be a bad kid, he’s reckless.’ I’d like people to get to know me before they make opinions about me,” Polzin said.

Bey’s ability to get the young people he photographs to really open up to him is a skill he attributes to his interest in getting to know the students as individuals.

“It’s about treating them with a certain amount of respect, and also just caring enough to ask,” Bey said.

“It’s one question that I kind of rephrase several different ways which is, ‘tell me something about yourself, that you think no one knows, but you would like someone to know if they were really going to know you.’”

Lansing photographer Suellen Hozman said the show is beautiful and engaging.

“All of these people are still, so the beauty of this show is that you engage with the conversation of silence,” Hozman said.

“You engage in their conversation of silence, which then becomes words when you read what’s with them.”

The collection can be seen 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday with extended hours Thursday until 8 p.m. and from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday until Dec. 18 at Kresge Art Museum.

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