How I missed Night Coming Tenderly, Black, Dawoud Bey’s extraordinary series of photos about the Underground Railroad is completely beyond me. Maybe Colson Whitehead had me looking one way, and Bey was right in front of me with portraits. Still, I have no excuse. So thank you, Michael Lobel for putting this 2017 project in my timeline.
Night takes its title from two lines by Langston Hughes, and its deep, dark tones and printing from Roy deCarava, but the evocation of place, history, memory, and the at-once embracing and ominous atmosphere of these nighttime spaces is entirely Bey. The series, 25 images, printed large, was commissioned by FRONT International: the Cleveland Biennial curated in 2018 by Michele Grabner. It was installed in St John’s Episcopal Church, the oldest church in Cleveland, and one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad for enslaved people before crossing Lake Eerie to freedom in Canada. In 2019 the series was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago.
When it opened in Cleveland, Maurice Berger discussed it in the Times, and Judd Tully did a feature on Bey keyed to the show in Chicago. But the most in-depth discussion I’ve found so far on the project is from the Art Institute photography curator Matthew Witkovsky, which was, for some reason, published in Art in America.
What absolutely blows my mind is that Bey printed these giant, 44 by 55 inch gelatin prints, manipulating the details of tone in the darkroom, and resulted in prints you can really only see in person:
By printing large, he makes room for the viewer’s body, and by printing so darkly, he effectively renders the viewer’s knowledge partial as well. The works demand time. We must stand before them and wait until details become clearer, then change our position to overcome additional interruptions from reflections or glare.
The prints, moreover, do not reproduce well. All illustrations of the works (including in these pages) are made from image files that Bey lightened with dissemination in mind. The originals would be hard to decipher in print, and they are also difficult to transmit via smartphone—they come through as black rectangles. The nighttime passage may thus be grasped only in person; it cannot readily be “shared” or “liked” and the version made available to a broad audience is a deliberate compromise.
Even between the image circulated by the museum for the show [top] and the image used to record the Night print the museum acquired, the difference is dramatic.
But from the installation view in St John’s Church, it is only partly accurate. The prints look like monochrome slabs that only reveal their image over time, to someone sitting in front of them in the pew.
Bey’s project turns out to not to be an illustration of the secret network which was only possible because of its invisibility, but an incarnation of that invisibility itself. And of the difficulty we in the present face as we try to look back into the past.
Escaping to Freedom, In the Shadow of Night (Berger) [nyt]
Dawoud Bey’s Shadowy Landscapes… (Witkovsky) [art in america]
‘I Ranged Far and Wide’… (Tully) [artnews]