In the Footsteps of the Enslaved

New York Times

30-01-2025

The terrifying first capture in Africa.
The deadly crossing of the Middle Passage.
The brutality of slave markets and servitude.
It's almost impossible to imagine, let alone depict, the full horrors of American slavery, although writers, directors and artists have tried.
But there's one moment that seems to have caught their attention less often: the first encounter of kidnapped Africans with the strange new land where they were marched into enslavement.
In a remarkable exhibition called 'Stony the Road,' at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, the artist Dawoud Bey takes us on the path that tens of thousands were forced to walk, from the slave ships that landed at the James River's docks to Richmond's slave pens and markets.
With 14 still photos and a vast, two-sided video projection, Bey explores the Richmond Slave Trail that extends for several miles in Virginia's capital. At Sean Kelly, Bey's stills are the first art you encounter. Those deluxe black-and-whites, almost a yard across, show various wooded spots along the trail, avoiding any details that speak of our era. (In fact, the trail now crosses many modern settings.) We get a view of trees and ground, of bits of river and patches of distant sky, such as an African might have encountered 250 years ago.
The images were shot on old-fashioned film and printed on traditional photographic paper, so we're treated to the velvety blacks and sparkling whites of landscapes by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and other pioneers of American photography. It's tempting to linger with those tasteful, orderly images — in the gallery, and in this review — but I discovered that they get a whole new meaning after seeing Bey's video at the gallery's rear.
That video is titled '350,000,' an estimate of the total number of enslaved people who passed through Richmond's trading markets. (The piece was originally commissioned for a major Bey show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond in 2023.) Ten minutes of black-and-white footage appear on a screen that bisects a big space and reaches almost to its high ceiling. It shows the same wooded path as in Bey's prints, but to utterly different effect.
The piece works hard to put us in the place — physical, but above all psychological — of one of Richmond's newly disembarked. The images are projected at 'life scale,' Bey told me, so that the path's tree trunks and branches are the same size on the screen as they would be if they were there before us in life. And the trip down the path is captured in a single take, without edits, by a Steadicam held at an adult's head-height, giving a captive's-eye view of the passage up the trail.
But the goal isn't to create a crisp, immersive substitute for a past reality. (Bey insists that his piece isn't about faking some kind of long-lost documentation.) It's about using the visible artifice of fine art to encourage a trip into a past we need to confront. In some ways Bey's video has more in common with a poet's evocative description than with a Spielbergish attempt at historical re-enactment.
So Bey's cinematographer, Bron Moyi, shot all the footage with a century-old Petzval lens, once used for dream sequences in silent movies. It blurs all but the middle of the scene it shows, giving an almost drunken effect to Bey's footage, which is also shown in somewhat slow-motion. Real vision never really works quite like that, but the Petzval provides an excellent metaphor for the kind of disorientation Africans must have felt on first being shoved ashore in Virginia.
They couldn't have known quite where they were going, or what the endgame might be — most couldn't understand their tormentors' language — and '350,000' has a similar lack of plot or endpoint. Its camera's 'eye' rarely looks straight down the path toward some far-off goal. Instead, it veers from earth to treetops; from river, down at right, to undergrowth that hems the path at left.
No one knows if captives would really have looked anywhere but at their own stumbling feet or at the back of the chained figure ahead, but the camera's wandering eye evokes the fracturing of any normal they might have known. Even the flora in Bey's video, sure to strike most Americans as an average woodland scene, must have seemed foreign.
Bey makes his disjunctive technique stand for the utter confusion — physical, cognitive, spiritual — that captives must have felt. A soundtrack, commissioned by Bey from the dance scholar E. Gaynell Sherrod, adds to the effect: It's a mash-up of random footfalls and birdcalls, of heartbeats and hoofbeats, of grunts and sighs and clinking chains. It doesn't quite reproduce what the enslaved might actually have heard, but it sometimes adds Hollywood melodrama that the visuals smartly avoid. However, Sherrod's soundtrack, and its lack of obvious sync to Bey's visuals, maps onto how trauma can fracture our perceptions.
In a final touch, Bey gives art viewers a more immediate taste of that same bewilderment: The occasional visitor who peers around to the other side of Bey's screen will eventually realize that the view there is actually the same path but seen on a different trudge down it. That gives a sense that Bey's installation doesn't recreate a single moment in someone's pain; it condenses all the moments that thousands of subjects might have suffered on the Richmond Slave Trail.
And then, leaving the video behind, you encounter Bey's stills once again, and now they seem to play a different role in his story. After witnessing the splintered sights in his video, his stills now seem to stand for the very firm and settled present that today's art world lives in, at so many removes from an enslaved person's view.
They give us something like the stable, settled view favored by Europe's artistic culture, circa 1800, when wild nature promised escape from the everyday into the sublime. It's almost as though Bey's prints offer a bright light at the end of their forest path, so that, as in many an Ansel Adams photo, the white of the immaculate silver print becomes the white of escape and transcendence. The prints have a stable authority, in their confident choice of subject, the snapping of the shutter, their deluxe printing, that isn't there in the video.
Bey's show gets its name from a passage in the second stanza of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' the hymn by James Weldon Johnson that premiered in 1900 and is known as the Black national anthem: 'Stony the road we trod/Bitter the chastening rod.'
Here's how the stanza ends: 'Out from the gloomy past/'Til now we stand at last/Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.'
Now, 125 years later, Bey's gloom seems to cast new light on art's gleam.
Through Feb. 22, Sean Kelly Gallery, 475 Tenth Avenue, Manhattan, 212-239-1181; skny.com.