From pristine wilderness to open roads, visions of the landscape have played a crucial role in forging American identity. When photographer Dawoud Bey wanted to take photographs on the country’s history, landscape was the province in which he chose to work.
“Neither its grandeur, nor the Emersonian notion of its symbolism,” he said. “Something very specific to this genre and not usually talked about: the trauma of the African-American presence that lies just beneath the surface.”
Trees, vaults of sky and the slippery surface of a deep river: Bey’s photographs use the established lexicon of landscape art. But his images represent places more sonorous than others, where history takes root in the earth and emits a sort of hum, places where “the leaves sometimes began to rustle, even when there was no wind “.
Bey’s latest series, Stony roadbrings to life the narrow path along the James River in Richmond, Virginia, on which more than 350,000 African slaves were led from their ships to pens in a sunken, swampy part of the city known as Shockoe Bottom . In the 19th century, this “place of sighs,” as abolitionist minister James B. Simmons described it in 1895, was the hub from which the chattel trade spread across the Deep South.
Today, the site of its auction block, offices and whipping room lies under 10 feet of earth and beneath the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike. “But the path has not been covered,” explains Bey, “you can still take it on foot. The ground still retains its shape and its memory.
An extract from Stony road will be shown by the Sean Kelly Gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach this month, while the complete work – 12 large, intensely tactile gelatin silver photographs and a film, “350,000” – will debut in New York during of the new year at the gallery’s premises in Chelsea, where I meet Bey on an unusually sweltering day in early November, the temperature is 25 degrees by mid-afternoon.
Bey, 71 and one of America’s most distinguished photographers, is in town from Chicago, where he is professor emeritus at Columbia College. However, he was born and raised in Queens, New York, and is a pure Harlemite at heart. His groundbreaking work, a sequence of intensely physical black-and-white street portraits, was made there in 1979. He feels a special connection to this neighborhood, he tells me, both for its sociocultural importance in the black history and because that’s where his parents lived. met and married. “When I’m in Harlem, I’m in the place that I remember and that I’m in. To me, that’s the sense of place.” He recently bought a house there. “I’ve been away for many years and now I’m coming back to work.”
The Richmond Slave Trail is not a landmark as such, or even well known. Bey himself hadn’t heard of it until Valerie Cassel Oliver, a curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, brought the three-mile course to his attention. The Museum subsequently commissioned the work and showed the photographs for the first time last year.
The series is part of a panoramic project that maps early African American history from the first steps into an unknown land (Stony road), to the Louisiana plantations (In this place here2019) and the Ohio Stops of the Underground Railroad (The night comes tenderly, black2017). It is, says Bey, an “elegy in three movements,” although he is considering a fourth.
Each of the titles in the series comes from black culture, with which Bey intends her work to be in conversation: “Stony the road” is a line from James Weldon Johnson’s 1900 poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing”; “In this place” is a phrase from Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel. Belovedand “Night coming tenderly, Black” is from Langston Hughes’ 1924 poem “Dream Variations.”
You can understand why the Virginia landscape seemed powerful to Bey. Slavery began here, at the misnamed Point Comfort, in 1619. It was also in this state that, in 1775, Governor Patrick Henry gave a famous speech sparking the fight for independence. “All these words about freedom and democracy,” Bey said, her soft voice rising abruptly to a roar, “‘Give me freedom, or give me death!’”
The physiognomy of the path is also striking: a tunnel of trees frozen by the shadow which always moves away from you, its end always being out of reach. Its sinuous shape is actually a scar, carved into the landscape by thousands of feet. The images are empty of these people, although suggestions about them drift. Light only passes through the tree canopy occasionally, to create whipped patterns on the ground, or a silver spool on the dark tide of the river. The congress of beauty and violence can seem uncomfortable, even dreadful, although that’s part of the problem.
“I created a formally beautiful object to make you stop and engage with it, and through that engagement, address a deeper question. “What exactly is this landscape? What happened here? Why is he here taking pictures of this?’
Bey was not always a landscaper, or even a photographer. He started out as a jazz musician – accomplished enough to play at Carnegie Hall – and still spends “as much time in jazz venues as he does in galleries and museums,” he tells me. Her plans for the evening include going to the Village Vanguard or a place downtown called Smoke.
Jazz echoes his philosophy. “Music that doesn’t say ‘I love you’; it doesn’t really tell you anything, but it also tells you everything and moves you emotionally. This is what I want my work to do.
Periodically, he adds a sound component to his photographs. “Not a soundtrack, not a song from that era, but imagining the sound of the story,” he says. For “350,000”, this involved bringing leaves and dirt from the Richmond slave track into the Foley pit of a recording studio and overlaying them with the sounds of “breathing, bodies hitting against body, to the rhythm of feet rubbing.”
Bey turned to photography around 1975, holding a solo exhibition of his 35mm street photos, Harlem, United Statesat the neighborhood’s Studio Museum in 1979. Half a dozen of them dot the room in which we speak. What does he think of his old job? “They’re still good photographs,” he says. “They give individuals a feeling of physical presence, which is very important to me. This makes the image less of an object, more of an experience – you can almost kiss yourself in it. Bey’s Street portraits (1988-91) are currently on display at the Denver Museum of Art.
History became his main focus about a decade ago, with a work commemorating the children and teenagers who were victims of a wave of racially motivated murders in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963. The diptychs of “The Birmingham Project” associated the portrait of a young person of the same age as one of the victims, with another adult 50 years older – the age of the victim if she had survived. “I wanted to understand what led to this moment,” Bey explains, “this absolute refusal to let black people occupy equal social space; what is the beginning of this story? And the beginning of this story is slavery.
Recently, Bey came to see Stony road and its associated series as “an act of resistance,” he tells me. “Against attempts to erase this history by legislating to suppress the teaching surrounding it; to the ignorance and complacency that keeps more and more people dumbfounded: “How the hell did we get here? – when in reality, the story explains it all. It’s quite simple. We got here, from there. There are very few things that surprise me. It’s a fairly unbroken line.
“Stony the Road”, January 10 to February 22, 2025 skny.com
‘Street Portraits’, until May 11, denverartmuseum.org
Sean Kelly, booth F15, Art Basel Miami Beach, December 6-8, 2024
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