Dawoud Bey created these portraits as part of a series of students for the exhibition The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography, held at the Jewish Museum in 2005–6. Bey and twelve other artists were commissioned to create photographic or video projects that uncovered and explored the varied, multicultural identities of twenty-first century Jews in the United States.
Jacob is the only child of a Jewish single mother, and his father was from Belize. Claire has an Ojibwe (Chippewa) grandmother and is also of Russian Jewish descent. Bey here uses a narrow depth of field, focusing the camera’s lens on the foreground of the images. In this way, the artist highlights the ways his subjects undermine easy assumptions about Jewishness. These works also illustrate Bey’s belief that young people “are arbiters of style in the community; their appearance speaks most strongly of how a community of people defines themselves at a particular historical moment.”