Dawoud Bey, full frame: On Richmond’s trail of the enslaved
Work of renowned photographer now on view at VMFA
RICHMOND — The urban parkland along the James River running through the city is true forest. Here grow maple, oak, hickory, cottonwood, sycamore, river birch, hackberry, fronds bowed under climbing English ivy, with winter creeper spreading underfoot.
Even the narrow half-mile from the Manchester Docks to the Interstate 95 bridge, wedged between the river and the sewage plant, has a dense, brambly energy, like the Jabberwock’s “tulgey wood.” On what is now designated as the Richmond Slave
Trail — where thousands of Africans were taken off ships from the Middle Passage, and later, when Richmond became the supply hub of the 19th-century chattel trade, loaded for shipment to the Deep South — the atmosphere feels properly primeval.
“When you enter this way, there’s no prelude,” said photographer Dawoud Bey, when we walked the trail in late September. “You’re just dropped in the space.” Rather than begin at the trailhead, with its parking lot and wayfinding markers, he had brought us in the back way, under the interstate. “I want as little residue of the contemporary, of the present moment, to cling to me while I’m working.”
For much of Bey’s celebrated career, his work was, in fact, resolutely contemporary. He emerged in the late 1970s with Harlem street studies in the spirit of his mentor Roy DeCarava, and portraiture, in his native New York City and elsewhere, of great warmth and empathy. Shifting to studio and conceptual work in the 1990s, he made large-format Polaroid diptychs and grids of friends — many of them artists such as Lorna Simpson or Sol and Carol LeWitt. In the 2000s, he made images of high school students in a collaborative method paired with their texts and sat strangers together for joint portraits.
Still using the language of the present-day portrait, he first turned to history for “The Birmingham Project” (2013), which explored the civic impact of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in September 1963 that killed four girls ages 11 to
14, and the death of two more teenage boys in the aftermath. Each diptych joined two Black Birminghamians — a contemporary of one of the victims, and a youth of the corresponding age.
Lately, however, the human figure has exited the frame of his photographs. Instead, in three series made in Ohio, Louisiana and now on the Richmond Slave Trail, he has turned his attention to the psychic geography of the Black experience — the deep relationship between American terrain and histories of bondage and freedom.
“Elegy,” Bey’s new exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, on view through Feb. 25, gathers this trilogy for the first time. It also premieres the Richmond series, “Stony the Road,” which the VMFA commissioned. (The title is drawn from a verse in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a poem by James Weldon Johnson known as the Black national anthem.) Across
all three series — totaling 42 black-and-white images printed at large scale from medium-format negatives, plus two film installations — the human presence is invisible yet deeply infused. The sum is brooding, evocative, lyrical.
In northeast Ohio, Bey photographed locations where fugitives would have passed in the night along the final spurs of the Underground Railroad, culminating in the dark, cathartic expanse of Lake Erie. In the plantations between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, he photographed the flat, moist landscapes, mosshung trees and surviving wood cabins of the enslaved.
In Richmond, he has reached back to the start of the story: The arrival of abducted Africans. Photographing since last year, he aimed to touch something ineffable in this place trod by the captives in coffles — for some, the first firm ground on which to unfold their bodies.
“This trail, hundreds of years old, is still visible,”
Bey said as we walked, the rumble of the highway traffic receding behind us. “The ground is still holding its memory and its shape.” His images are of the path traversing the tangle — leaves and branches up close, the saturation of foliage, the water’s edge.
For Bey, these works make an intentional intervention in the American landscape tradition, with its paucity of Black practitioners and perspectives. They are formal compositions, his attempt to develop a language, he said, from “a deep visual exploration and engagement with the place.” They are also a contribution to the work of public history. But the deepest driver, he said, is a kind of spiritual responsibility.
“This is ancestor work,” he said. “Stepping outside the art context, the project context, this is the work of keeping our ancestors present in the contemporary conversation.”
Bey, a MacArthur “genius” award winner, turned 70 in November. He has long been based in Chicago, where he teaches photography at Columbia College Chicago. Richmond wasn’t on his radar until Valerie Cassel Oliver, a close friend who is VMFA’s curator of modern and contemporary art, called to suggest that it might be a promising site.
Plenty of attention has shone on Richmond for the huge statues of Confederate figures that adorned the city’s Monument Avenue, and the 2020 protests that brought about their removal. The Confederacy’s last capital, Richmond became a hub of Lost Cause ideology. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, sponsor of monuments across the South, has its headquarters next to the VMFA; a Confederate Memorial Chapel sits on the museum’s grounds.
Richmond’s role in building the slave economy garners far less public awareness, said Omilade Janine Bell, president of Elegba Folklore Society, a group dedicated to Richmond’s Black history. Many sites are unmarked, destroyed or buried under parking lots. But the Slave Trail (which Bell and others prefer to call the Trail of Enslaved Africans), designated in 1998, is notable for its riverbank stretch that so many captives walked.
On visiting, Bey felt the power. “This place was the epicenter of the trade in Black bodies upon which rests the entire foundation of this country to this day,” he said. “It didn’t happen in some mythic place — it happened here.” He added: “I wanted to not just photograph it but to make work in a way that pulls the viewer into that history.”
Bey approached Richmond with experience from “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” his Ohio project (named for a line in a Langston Hughes poem), and “In This Here Place,” his Louisiana plantation series (after a passage in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”) — and with certain principles that oriented the trilogy.
First, the work would not be didactic. “I’m not into staging re-creations,” he said. In Ohio, considering the Underground Railroad, he determined that work on Black fugitives on the move toward freedom should not depict the figure but rather try to imagine the terrain as people might have seen it: cautiously, by night.
At Evergreen Plantation in Louisiana, now a research site with 22 surviving slave cabins, he let the geometry of the dwellings — built by the enslaved, using skills they brought with them — guide his images. The goal, he said, was a “visceral, material sense of this Black space of captivity.”
All along, he said, he
was working not toward documentary capture but toward creating an art object, and he applied much of his craft in the printing process — notably the hypnotic dark-on-dark depth of some works.
In Richmond, the task Bey set himself was still more challenging, with just the path, foliage and water as raw materials.
“You would think there’s not much here to look at,” he said as we paused on the trail. But pay attention, and the underlying structure of the landscape appears, for instance, in a tangle of small branches, a larger arc, an opening to the water. “What might those things add up to,” he said, when composed into the frame of a photograph. “It becomes about identifying the form that is revealed as one moves through the landscape.”
In a time of antagonism over history and critical narratives — from monuments to curricula, museums to public libraries — Bey’s landscape proposes a different method to communicate American stories, through the power of abstraction.
For Cassel Oliver, the curator, Bey has “mastered the technique of allowing the lens to be the eyes of the body,” inviting, even across the centuries, a kind of empathy. “Through the sheer beauty of the work,” she added, “he’s allowing us to see the trail as we have never seen it.”
With “Elegy,” Bey has departed from portraiture — the form no longer stimulates him, he told me — but has deepened, if anything, his study of Black American experience. The common subject in his new work, he said, is “the unseen Black presence in the landscape.”
The perspective he brings is not just his own. With titles drawn from Black literature, Bey signals belonging to a larger tradition than just photography. And in video works made in Louisiana and Richmond, he collaborates with musicians and dancers.
Projected on two huge, back-to-back screens, the film “350,000” — the number is an estimated tally of the enslaved who may have marched to or from the Richmond markets — brings the viewer onto the trail, the lens at human height, sometimes glancing down or raised to the sky.
Shot in black and white by cinematographer
Bron Moyi, it includes a soundtrack of staccato breaths and body percussion — the work of dancers, also unseen, directed by E. Gaynell Sherrod, a choreographer and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
In preparing the work, Sherrod said, the dancers read about the physical experience of ship holds and coffles. Visiting the trail, they imagined how the enslaved of different ages and sizes would have experienced it. They recorded in studio pits filled with dirt or gravel. The sound was completed at a Richmond studio.
The result is subtle and open, almost like a free-jazz improvisation. A percussionist before he turned to photography, Bey aspired to a sound that “resonated with the over heightened presence of these 350,000 bodies moving through that space.”
I asked Bey if he viewed “Elegy” as freedom work. The better term, he told me, was resistance — in the spirit of the “broad and long history of Black expressive culture that both sustains and marks our place here.”
“Resistance and struggle is constant,” he said. “And so it continues.”
“[The riverbank of the slave trail] was the epicenter of the trade in Black bodies upon which rests the entire foundation of this country to this day. ... It didn’t happen in some mythic place.” — Dawoud Bey