Stony the Road, photographer Dawoud Bey’s current exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, led me to some against-the-grain thinking that provoked a few vexing conclusions. It might do the same for you.
If you were to peer at the reclusively lit gelatin silver photographs mounted on Dibond, as I did, you would encounter forest scenes in which dappled sunlight pierces through a leaf canopy; the undulant surfaces of tranquil bodies of water reflect the sun and the nearby trees; earthen paths gouged out by humans curve and meander through verdant, natural growth; and tree limbs intervene on these paths at odd angles, arced and bent like gnarled scaffolding. One word that aptly describes these scenes is “beautiful.”
However, Bey is depicting the Richmond Slave Trail, a two-and-a-half-mile path that once led the first Black people enslaved in the United States from the Manchester Docks to the auction houses of Shockoe Bottom, in Richmond, Virginia. The gallery’s press release insists on me seeing what is not perceptible in these images:
Bey’s series captures the historical and emotional texture of the Richmond Slave Trail—a well-trodden path of leaves, branches, and waterways that reveal the lingering imprints of the history of enslavement in America.
This sounds like mysticism. The imprints of this history are precisely what’s not revealed; they are actually obscured by the sylvan charm of the images.
I have written in the past about Bey’s simultaneously speculative and documentary work. I still struggle to see more in these photographs than the pastoral beauty they present. I can’t perceive the African captives marched into enslavement along this track in the 1600s — to do so requires an act of imagination. Ironically, the path also exists today as a historic walking trail described on a Virginia tourism web page as part of a province that is “for lovers.” You, too, might experience cognitive dissonance given historical descriptions and analyses of the brutality of the United States’s slavery regime and the plethora of art made about this. I can’t bring these contrasting perspectives into a singular, coherent view no matter how much I rub my eyes and squint. Perhaps that’s the aim of the work: to show that documentary photography can shroud rather than illuminate.
The press release goes on to state: “Bey’s Stony the Road series is an ongoing exploration of the deep connections between African American history, the American landscape, and the traumas embedded in those landscapes.”
Can landscapes hold traumas? And if they can, why would they hold human ones? The earth is more than 4.5 billion years old. If it has a memory, it is a geologic one. The planet might recall the Cambrian explosion, about 530 million years ago, when an abundance of animals emerged onto the evolutionary scene. It might recall the Permian extinction about 250 million years ago when something killed approximately 90% of the planet’s species. Humans only developed agriculture and transitioned to a settlement lifestyle in the past 12,000 years. While acknowledging the depths of depravity of the transatlantic slave trade, why would the land remember this when it has likely experienced exponentially greater loss of life? Perhaps I’m wrong and the ground remembers everything. But as far as I can tell, this is not in evidence.
The point is: We remember, and it’s crucial that we do, and not foist off our responsibility onto mute things that do not answer when we call. We humans have a tendency to project onto other bodies or beliefs — the universe, various gods, fate — that which our own bodies struggle to bear and our intellects struggle to hold. Perhaps we use the land as a convenient place to let these generational traumas rest because they are brutally heavy.
The artist most effectively utilizes his imaginative powers and inventiveness in the 10-minute film “350,000” (2023), which refers to the estimated 350,000 men, women, and children sold from Richmond’s auction blocks between 1830 and 1860. The film, projected on two enormous back-to-back screens, is a collaborative project, with cinematography by Bron Moyi and the soundtrack developed with Virginia Commonwealth University Professor E. Gaynell Sherrod. The camera slowly tracks the trail, as if following the gaze of someone trying to understand where they are and what this path leads to, while at times beguiled by the light falling through awnings of leaves. The soundtrack starts out with scraping and scratching like heavy equipment being moved. It then morphs into the grunts and groans of strenuous human labor. Later still, it changes into guttural enunciations that almost approximate speech.
What those enslaved people actually experienced can only be imagined, for the most part, because we don’t have records of their sights and sounds. But we can reach out to them by invention. This interjection of our speculation into a story of demolition and deprivation is our way of making a way out of no way. It is our way of acknowledging our profound loss. The landscape that sits in stony silence will continue to do so. Bey’s photographs don’t need the rhetorical staging of animistic belief. They are elegiac and haunting, and speak poignantly to the African-American experience of making beauty out of the most wretched circumstances. And in telling the stories they tell, they demonstrate that at times it’s not factual truth we’re after, but emotional truth, and all these truths in tandem might set us free.
Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road continues at Sean Kelly gallery (475 10th Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) through February 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
