Please join us for a conversation between artists Dawoud Bey and An-My Lê, moderated by Carnegie Museum of Art curator of photography Dan Leers. This special event features two renowned photographers who have singular histories and practices but through their life work as artists share an interconnected past. Expanding our ideas and experience of landscape, Bey and Lê are making some of the most exciting and instantly recognizable images today.

Dawoud Bey began his career as an artist in 1975 with a series of pictures, Harlem, USA, that were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. More recently, he has turned to landscape with a series entitled Night Coming Tenderly, Black which references the presence of The Underground Railroad in the Cleveland area.

An-My Lê makes evocative images that draw on a landscape tradition to address the complexity of war. Photographing military training, reenactments, and Hollywood film shoots, Lê creates nuanced pictures that explore the landscape as a backdrop to conflict. More than 100 of her photographs are currently on view in the first-ever survey of her work organized by Carnegie Museum of Art.

Bey and Lê graduated from the same MFA program in 1993 and have gone on to similarly successful careers, yet this marks the first time they will be in dialogue in a public program. Their conversation will cover their artistic beginnings, their shared trajectories, and the significance of the contemporary landscape to their current photographic practice.