African American photographer Dawoud Bey (born 1953) has a
new exhibit touring now titled "Elegy." These images document landscapes where enslaved people worked and suffered, mainly in Louisiana and Virginia. Above is a recent picture taken on the
Richmond Slave Trail, which winds through the weedy woods that now occupy the site of Richmond's old docks. Richmond was a significant site for arrivals of slave ships from Africa and then a major port for the export of slaves toward the south and west in the 1820-1860 period. Bey's photographs of this strange place are collectively titled "Stony the Road," 2023. The title come from James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (1917):
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
Conjoined Trees, Field, 2019
Irrigation Ditch, Louisiana, 2019
Sugarcane II, 2019
More at the NY Times.
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