Dawit N.M is currently enjoying his first museum exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia – a stone’s throw from where the director and photographer grew up. The Eye That Follows is a curation of the Ethiopian-born, NYC-based artist’s personal imagery - captured everywhere from his family home to the streets of Addis Ababa - that express his preoccupations with community, diasporic cultures and the mercurial nature of seeing and being seen. “My fascination with the commonality of the human experience and the emotions that we decide to embrace or deny produces a consistent backdrop for my work,” he explains.

Of the work on show, Seth Feman, Chrysler’s deputy director for art and interpretation and curator of photography, reflects: “Eyes peering back at the camera from strangers encountered on the street, from between two out-of-focus human forms or from beneath a pile of rocks, suggest an exchange of glances that moves between Dawit and all those he films, weaving together a community from the immaterial space of these relationships.”

Dawit N.M relocated to the US aged 6 and discovered film during high school. The Chrysler was in fact the first institution he ever visited during those early years. “It’s the place that demonstrated the importance of art and the archive of culture to me,” he recalls. He went on to develop an appreciation for photography while studying at the nearby Old Dominion University. Now fast becoming internationally recognised for his intimate and empathic explorations into loss, faith and love, the exhibition includes videos made in close collaboration with singer/songwriter Mereba, and images from his 2018 self-published photobook, Don’t Make Me Look Like The Kids On TV.

“When I made Don’t Make Me Look Like the Kids on TV, I scavenged through piles of family photos taken in Ethiopia and kept asking myself, who took these photos?” Dawit explains. “I remember being amazed by the quietness of two of them – one of my mother when she was pregnant with me and the other of my father holding me in his arms as he came out of the water. These photos started this narrative in my head that there’s been this photographer in the family that I’ve never known about and that somehow I inherited those eyes after an incident that almost blinded me as a child.”

“I played on this tree and I formed an eye infection from the poisonous leaves. Every morning, I would wake up in darkness. My mother would have to walk me to the bathroom and rinse my face with hot water until I could open my eyes again. That experience stuck with me forever. Those moments of not being able to see made me realise the privilege of seeing. That experience - mixed with this idea I’ve built about these photos led me to come up with the title - The Eye That Follows. Absurd yes, but what’s art without a bit of it?”

The Eye That Follows: Photographs by Dawit N.M. is on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, until 16 August 2020