The Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s (VMFA) Elegy is an exhibition by MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey and curated by the incomparable Valerie Cassel Oliver. Developed by Bey in Louisiana, Virginia, and Ohio between 2017 and 2023, Elegy presents three distinct and intertwined collections of large-scale black-and-white photographs alongside two immersive multi-channel color video installations. This cohesive triad highlights held narratives of enslavement and emancipation along a journey that follows rivers and trails up and across the American landscape. Bey’s photographs frame terrestrial marks of US history in black and white, accentuate the sadness and the triumphs pressed into the land, and give shape to the heartaches of American people’s contemporary lived experiences.

Bey is most known for his decades-long career as a portrait photographer, creating intimate depictions of African American life in the United States. His critically acclaimed debut exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem, U.S.A. (1979), featured twenty-five black-and-white photographs that reflect the spirit of Harlem in portraits of both young and seasoned faces, framed and posed beautifully within their lived environments.

Bey’s 2013 black-and-white diptych portrait series, The Birmingham Protect, commemorates the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four young Black girls—Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise—and injured twenty others. The Birmingham Protect, which also remembers Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware, two Black boys killed in racially motivated murders that same Sunday, features sixteen large-scale diptych prints of thirty-two Birmingham residents. These diptychs pair portraits of kids the same age as the children who were killed sixty years ago alongside photographs of adults who are the age that these martyrs would have been had they lived to see 2013.

Elegy, however, features landscape photographs that are absent of human bodies, but stark in their evidence of human activity. Bey describes these images not as documents, but as “portraits” of “subjective space" (“In Conversation with Dawoud Bey,” VMFA, 11th November 2023). In this, Bey works against the historical and objectifying claims on the land framed by the gaze of white American landscape photographers. During a public conversation at the VMFA with Cassel Oliver, Bey juxtaposed his landscape work against the tradition of 19th Century white American photography, which depicts the American West as an expansive and empty space. As Bey notes, such images “represented an unpopulated American landscape, which was of course in fact populated, and the photographs became the visual blueprint for what became this idea of Manifest Destiny” (Bey, 2023). The circulation of these landscape photographs, presented as objective documentation, facilitated and encouraged an ideology that supported the genocide and displacement of Indigenous Native American communities and sanctioned the theft of land by waves of white settlers. In opposition to this objectification and erasure, Bey’s work provides emancipatory evidence. He uses his lens to present the stories of Black life as an existence historically evident in the American landscape, providing subjective portraits of something both persistent and ephemeral. Elegy explores narratives of American slavery burned into the language of the land over time, inscribed as paths that American people walk (still). As a faithful witness to America’s sometimes-forgotten societal traumas, Bey followed these paths to create works that push us to reconcile with the ways these layered histories continue to influence our present-day environments and struggles. 

In Bey’s work, time is both collapsed and expansive. The vivid and desaturated gelatin silver prints that drive the exhibition allow viewers to walk into and out of the portraits like portals, as we imagine the centuries, millennia, eons, of layered historical narratives that inform the landscapes Bey frames for us. Like a journey through the trials of US enslavement, the exhibition begins with Stony The Road (2023), a series of photographs commissioned by the VMFA. Bey made these photographs as he walked the length of Richmond’s slave trail from the James River to Shockoe Bottom: the historic center of Richmond’s prolific slave-trading industry. Here we begin on water’s edge, like so many Black (North/Central/South/Caribbean) American stories, knowing that an estimated twelve million African people were trafficked across the Atlantic between 1525 and 1866 to land on similar shores. Bey’s Stony The Road landscape portraits portray new light coming in, through knowing leaves and branches, illuminating the beauty of ancient riverbanks and beaten trails once marked by shackled feet and now maintained by stewards, tourists, and student groups. On my walk into the portal that is Untitled (The Light on the Trail), I took in the gleaming warmth of the sun, the grace of the flora, and imagined what this space might have been like during the thousands of years it was home to the precolonial care of the Powhatan Confederacy, before chattel slavery consumed its identity. The emphasis on a landscape that bears the memory of human activity, but is absent of bodies, challenges our sense of time and enlists our imagination to discern what is “new” in the images and what has “always been here.” This absence of bodies can also be seen as a necessary abstraction that metaphorically frames the unknowable details that have been omitted from the archive (such as the exact names, numbers, and stories of the many Black and Indigenous people who walked these lands) as empty spaces. It necessitates sincere effort to fathom and experience just how long “we” have been part of these trails, and the expansive present-day ramifications of these histories.

Stony The Road leads us to 350,000, a two-sided (two-channel) black-and-white video installation that depicts a similar walk Bey took along Richmond’s slave trail, with an original soundtrack that adds rhythm and narrative cadence to the first half of the exhibition. Through the title and the sonic composition of layered chains, chants, drums, and other sounds, the installation echoes and alludes to the three hundred fifty thousand enslaved men, women, and children who walked these same trails through Richmond and were sold at the Shockoe auction blocks from the 1830s until the end of the US Civil War in 1865. Next, this journey takes us through a series of photographs entitled In This Here Place (2019), which depict various sites throughout Louisiana, along the Mississippi River, and at the Evergreen, Destrehan, Laura, Oak Alley, and Whitney Plantations. Bey’s photograph Irrigation Ditch holds dearly a watery void cut deep across the land, kept fresh by nature like an open wound, which bisects a sea of tall grass whose wild expanse is contained only by groves of trees fringing both sides of the image. The poetry of the terrain is positioned against a sparsely clouded sky, whose gradient light is mirrored in circular conversation across the surface of the water. Without words, the landscape tells us a layered story of loss unrepaired amongst determined growth in every direction. From here we move on to the three-channel color video installation Evergreen (2019). Through slow panning lenses these videos explore the preserved site of the Evergreen Plantation with a soundtrack that adds texture and rhythm to the viewer’s experience as they move between spaces.

The exhibition ends with the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), photographed in locations around Cleveland and Hudson, Ohio. These sites were a last stop for many who escaped enslavement on the nationwide stretch up the United States, along the Underground Railroad. This area is known as “Station Hope,” where thousands fled the US, across Lake Erie, towards the dream of self-emancipation in Canada. While viewing Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky), I stepped into the empathetic perspective of a subject who, two centuries ago, was at the end of a long and exhausting northward journey through the country, staring out at the water, wondering if I would be able to maintain my strength and courage long enough to row quietly across this last dark expanse into an unknown freedom—there was no turning back.

I have lived in this beautiful land we now call Virginia my entire life. I come from Black people whose healthy ancestral roots extend clearly back through Virginia and North Carolina for centuries before being obscured by a journey that crosses and gets lost in the opaque temporal body of the Atlantic, where so many familial legacies were confused and salinated before arriving here in the Americas. Bey’s work is a reminder that this is all still here, living with us, like scars on an aging body. His collective body of work highlights the literal and metaphorical footprints left by the brutal practice of human trafficking and enslaved labor alongside the historical resistance to these injustices in the United States. Photographing these footprints “now” pulls this history into our lived present and forces us to contend with the ways these traumas continue to affect us every day. As I write these words, I cannot sit with Bey’s work about colonial violence, torture, kidnapping, and displacement without thinking about the millions of people in Gaza currently suffering the nightmares of neocolonial warfare, genocide, and occupation (still), and without reflecting upon similar actors, reputed God-given justifications, and even rumors of underground resistance networks eerily similar to America’s Underground Railroads.

Richmond’s historical mechanisms can often center, to the point of fetishization, its colonial history, its history of enslavement, and its four years as the capital of the US Southern Confederacy. This centering comes from a primarily white-male perspective that still ironically presents as heroic. While this obviously contributes to the enduring maintenance of white patriarchal supremacy, this narrative structure also places these events into the temporal space of “the historical,” severing the link between these past injustices and the ongoing violence of racism, policing, inequality, mass incarceration, segregation, colonization, oppression, and hurt. Bey, with credited company and assistance, is following in the warm footprints of a Black diaspora and presents the work in a way that makes their ongoing stories impossible to ignore.

In Richmond, we walk these trails often. What struck me on my third visit to see Elegy was the fact that we are indeed “still” walking these trails as a country. This is Bey’s point: to give credence to the timely urgency of the work of global emancipation in the present. Taken together, the works in Elegy speak both to the beauty and the violence witnessed by the land, the beauty and the violence that “is” the land and, again, connects—through time—the history of enslavement, forced removal, and genocide as the framework through which we must view the landscape, and ourselves, in this current moment.