via: bey
Notes:
Dawoud Bey’s landscape work marks a poignant and evocative expansion of his acclaimed photographic practice, best known for portraiture. In his landscape series, particularly Night Coming Tenderly, Black, Bey masterfully reimagines the American landscape as a site of historical memory and quiet resistance. Through deeply shadowed tones and rich, almost tactile blacks, Bey transforms ordinary fields, forests, and rural paths into contemplative spaces that evoke the clandestine journeys of freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. His photographs are not only visually compelling but also historically resonant, engaging viewers in a meditative act of remembrance.
What distinguishes Bey’s landscapes is their psychological depth and formal rigor. Unlike traditional landscape photography that celebrates light and openness, Bey leans into obscurity, intimacy, and restraint. The dark tonal range invites a slower, more attentive form of seeing, mirroring the cautious movements and emotional tension of those navigating these routes to freedom. His compositional choices—low horizons, dense foliage, and shallow depth—draw viewers into the frame, situating them not as distant observers but as potential participants in these hushed narratives.
Bey’s landscape work is a powerful example of photography’s ability to reclaim and reframe history through aesthetics. His images offer a counter-visual history—one that privileges the unseen, the whispered, and the invisible legacies embedded in the land. Rather than presenting history as fixed or monumental, Bey’s work asks us to feel it, walk through it, and consider its echoes in the present. Through these landscapes, Dawoud Bey expands the vocabulary of both landscape photography and African American visual storytelling, offering a body of work that is both haunting and profoundly humane.
- RJG/AI