First, the work would not be didactic. “I’m not into staging recreations,” 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 curriculums, 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.”
