Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic From pristine wilderness to the open road, visions of the landscape have been\u00a0crucial to the forging of America\u2019s identity. When photographer Dawoud Bey wanted to make photographs about the country\u2019s history, then, landscape was the province in which he chose to work.\u00a0\u201cNot the grandeur of it, not the Emersonian notion of its symbolism,\u201d he says. \u201cSomething that\u2019s very specific to that genre and generally not spoken about \u2014 the trauma of the African-American presence that sits just beneath the surface.\u201dTrees, vaults of sky and the sliding surface of a deep river: Bey\u2019s photographs utilise the established lexicon of landscape art. But his pictures are of places more resonant than the rest, where history is stoked into the earth and emits a kind of hum, places where \u201cthe leaves would sometimes start rustling, even when there was no wind\u201d.The congress of beauty and violence can feel uncomfortable, appalling even, though that is partly the pointBey\u2019s latest series, Stony the Road, brings to vivid life the narrow path beside the James River in Richmond, Virginia, on which upwards of 350,000 enslaved Africans were marched from their ships to holding pens in a sunken, swampy part of town known as Shockoe Bottom. In the 19th century, this \u201cplace of sighs\u201d, as the abolitionist minister James B Simmons described it in 1895, was the hub from which the chattel trade spidered across the Deep South.Today, the site of its auction block, offices and whipping room lies beneath 10ft of fill dirt and the Richmond-Petersburg turnpike. \u201cBut the trail has not been covered up,\u201d says Bey, \u201cyou can still walk on it. The ground still holds its shape and its memory.\u201dA excerpt from Stony the Road will be shown by Sean Kelly Gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach this month, while the full work \u2014 12 large and intensely tactile gelatin silver photographs and a film, \u201c350,000\u201d \u2014 makes its New York debut in the new year at the gallery\u2019s premises in Chelsea, where I meet Bey on an uncommonly sultry day in early November, the temperature 25 degrees by mid-afternoon. \u00a0Bey, who is 71 and among the most distinguished photographers in America, is in town from Chicago, where he is professor emeritus at Columbia College. He was born and raised in Queens, New York, however, and is pure Harlemite in his soul. His breakthrough work, a sequence of intensely physical black-and-white street portraits, was made there in 1979. He feels a particular connection to that neighbourhood, he tells me, both for its sociocultural significance in Black history and because it\u2019s where his parents met and married. \u201cWhen I\u2019m in Harlem, I\u2019m standing in the place that I remember, and the place that I\u2019m in. For me, that\u2019s the meaning of a place.\u201d He recently bought a house there. \u201cI\u2019ve been away for many years, and now I\u2019m working my way back.\u201dThe Richmond slave trail is not a landmark as such, or even well-known. Bey himself hadn\u2019t heard of it until Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, drew its three-mile route to his attention. The Museum went on to commission the work and showed the photographs first, last year.The series is part of a panoramic endeavour that maps early African American history from first steps in an unfamiliar land (Stony the Road), to the Louisiana plantations (In This Here Place, 2019) and the Ohio stages of the Underground Railroad (Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017). It is, Bey says, an \u201celegy in three movements\u201d, though he is mulling over a fourth.Each of the series\u2019 titles comes from Black culture, with which Bey intends his work to be in conversation: \u201cStony the road\u201d is a line in James Weldon Johnson\u2019s 1900 poem \u201cLift Every Voice and Sing\u201d; \u201cIn this here place\u201d is a phrase from Toni Morrison\u2019s 1987 novel Beloved, and \u201cNight coming tenderly, Black\u201d is from Langston Hughes\u2019s 1924 poem \u201cDream Variations\u201d.You can understand why the landscape of Virginia felt potent to Bey. Slavery began here, at the inaptly named Point Comfort in 1619. The state is also where, in 1775, Governor Patrick Henry made a famous speech igniting the fight for independence. \u201cAll those words about freedom and democracy,\u201d says Bey, his gentle voice rising abruptly to a roar, \u201c\u2018Gimme liberty, or gimme death!\u2019\u201d\u00a0The physiognomy of the trail is arresting, too: a shadow-chilled tree-tunnel that is forever curving away from you, its end forever out of reach. Its winding shape is in effect a scar, worn into the landscape by thousands of feet. The pictures are empty of those people, though suggestions of them drift out. Light breaks through the tree canopy only occasionally, to make Chantilly patterns on the ground, or spool silvery on the dark river\u2019s tide. The congress of beauty and violence can feel uncomfortable, appalling even, though that is partly the point.\u00a0\u201cI made a formally beautiful object to make you stop and engage with it, and through that engagement come to the deeper question. \u2018What exactly is this landscape? What happened here? Why is he here making photographs of that?\u2019\u201dBey was not always a landscapist, nor even a photographer. He started out a jazz musician \u2014 accomplished enough to play Carnegie Hall \u2014\u00a0and still spends \u201cas much time in jazz haunts as galleries and museums,\u201d he tells me. His plans for the evening involve hitting the Village Vanguard, or a place uptown called Smoke.\u00a0Jazz chimes with his ethos. \u201cMusic that doesn\u2019t tell you \u2018I love you\u2019; that doesn\u2019t tell you anything really, but is also telling you everything and moving you emotionally. That is what I want my work to do.\u201dPeriodically, he brings a sonic component to his photographs. \u201cNot a soundtrack, not a song from that era, but imagining the sound of history,\u201d he says. For \u201c350,000\u201d, that involved bringing leaves and soil from the Richmond slave trail into the Foley pit of a recording studio and layering it with the sounds of \u201cbreathing, of body smacking against body, the rhythm of scuffing feet\u201d.Bey made the switch to photography around 1975, securing a solo show of his 35mm street pictures, Harlem, USA, at the neighbourhood\u2019s Studio Museum in 1979. A half dozen of these dot the room in which we are talking. How does he feel about his old work? \u201cThey\u2019re still good photographs,\u201d he says. \u201cThey give the individuals a sense of physical presence, which is very important to me. It makes the picture less object, more experience \u2014 you can almost embrace yourself in them.\u201d Bey\u2019s Street Portraits (1988-91) are currently showing at the Denver Museum of Art.History became his primary focus about a decade ago, with a work that memorialised the child and teenage victims of a racially motivated killing spree in Birmingham, Alabama in September 1963. The diptychs of \u201cThe Birmingham Project\u201d paired one portrait of a young person the same age as one of the victims, with another of an adult 50 years older \u2014 the victim\u2019s age had she or he survived. \u201cI wanted to understand what led to that moment,\u201d says Bey, \u201cthis absolute refusal to let Black people occupy equal social space; what is the beginning of that narrative? And the beginning of that narrative is slavery.\u201dRecently, Bey has come to see Stony the Road and its associated series as \u201can act of resistance\u201d, he tells me. \u201cAgainst attempts to erase this history by legislating away the teaching around it; to the ignorance and complacency that keeps more people dumbfounded \u2014 \u2018How the hell did we get here? \u2014 when really, history explains all of it. It\u2019s pretty straightforward. We got here, from there. There is very little that surprises me. It\u2019s a pretty unbroken line.\u201d\u00a0\u2018Stony the Road\u2019, January 10-February 22, 2025 skny.com\u2018Street Portraits\u2019, to May 11, denverartmuseum.org Sean Kelly, Booth F15, Art Basel Miami Beach, December 6-8 2024Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic From pristine wilderness to the open road, visions of the landscape have been\u00a0crucial to the forging of America\u2019s identity. When photographer Dawoud Bey wanted to make photographs about the country\u2019s history, then, landscape was the province in which he chose to work.\u00a0\u201cNot the grandeur<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":149440,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-149439","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149441,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149439\/revisions\/149441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}