Untitled #19 (Creek and Trees)
Artist
Dawoud Bey
(American, born 1953)
Date2017, printed 2023
Mediumgelatin silver print
Dimensionsimage: 111.8 × 139.7 cm (44 × 55 in.)
sheet: 121.9 × 149.9 cm (48 × 59 in.)
framed: 122.6 × 150.5 × 5.1 cm (48 1/4 × 59 1/4 × 2 in.)
sheet: 121.9 × 149.9 cm (48 × 59 in.)
framed: 122.6 × 150.5 × 5.1 cm (48 1/4 × 59 1/4 × 2 in.)
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LineMuseum purchase through the Gift of Jean McDonough
Object number2024.2
Label TextBey’s poetic series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, titled after lines in a 1926 poem by Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes, memorializes Ohio homes and patches of land on the likely path of the Underground Railroad, a largely unrecorded network of “stations” that aided enslaved African Americans on their perilous path to emancipation. Historians date the clandestine routes to approximately 1810 through 1865, the end of the Civil War. Bey presents his photographs from the vantage point of a fugitive navigating what Hughes called “a nocturnal darkness that could be seen as a space of tender embrace.” While they are the result of extensive historical research, Bey’s series focuses on the visceral experience of escape rather than documenting a specific location.
The scale, tonality, and slightly off-kilter perspective of Bey’s photographs approximate the spatial and sensory experience of those cautiously traversing unfamiliar and dangerous terrain at night. Like the phenomenon of entering a dimly lit space, viewers’ eyes slowly adjust to the dark tonal range and the reflective gelatin silver paper before they become oriented to the steely-gray landscape. Bey photographed the landscapes during the day and then overexposed the negatives, creating the impression that the photographs were captured at night.On View
Not on view
