Visualizing African-American History Through Photography

Guiding Philosophical Concerns

• Speaker (implicitly photographer Dawoud Bey) foregrounds two persistent questions:
  • How can history—especially African-American history—be imagined and visualized so that it resonates in the present?
  • What ethical position must the image-maker occupy when representing communities that have historically been excluded from authorship?
• Recurrent strategies
  • Use of paired images, large scale, and material darkness to collapse temporal distance and invite slow looking.
  • Turning photographic objects into immersive experiences rather than mere documents.
  • Treating the museum not as a neutral repository but as a contested, activatable space that should answer to its publics.

Formative Encounter — “Harlem on My Mind,” 1969

• Year/age context: $1969$, artist is $16\ \text{years old}$ and has just acquired a first camera.
• Exhibition details
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
  • Contained photographs of ordinary African Americans—first time the speaker had seen such images in that institution.
  • Controversy: Curated about the Black community without Black community input.
• Key lessons drawn
  • Museums can marginalize voices even while exhibiting them; they are not benign spaces.
  • Sparked the idea that one can “speak back” to a museum through both protest and artistic production.
• Immediate artistic response
  • First photographic project: street portraits in Harlem.
  • Technical/ethical challenge: make the street look "natural" while remaining visible as photographer and allowing subjects to self-present with respect.

The Birmingham Project

• Genesis event (age $11$)
  • Parents bring home the photo-book “The Movement.”
  • Striking image: a girl in a hospital bed, eyes bandaged—she is the younger sister of one of the four girls killed in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
  • Emotional impact: photo “sheared its way” into the artist’s psyche, exposing him to violence parents had tried to shield.
• Conceptual framework
  • Objective: visualize both presence and absence created by racist terror in Birmingham.
  • Two portrait groups:
  1. Children photographed in $2012$–$2013$ who are the same ages as the six victims were in $1963$.
     • Numerical reminder: $6 = 4 + 2$ (four girls + two boys killed that day and in the aftermath).
  2. Adults photographed who are the ages the six victims would have been $50\ \text{years later}$.
  • Pairing strategy produces single works that embody a half-century of unrealized possibility.
• Exhibition
  • Opened September 2013 at the Birmingham Museum of Art.
  • Layered meaning for adult sitters: many recalled a time when they were legally barred from entering that very museum.
• Significance
  • Fuses personal remembrance, public history, and institutional critique.
  • Demonstrates how photography can “hold” both the sensation of time passing and the void of lives interrupted.

“Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (Northeastern Ohio)

• Title source: Langston Hughes’ “Pondering Variations”; key line: “Night coming tenderly black like me.”
  • Interprets night-blackness as a tender, protective embrace for fugitives.
• Historical subject
  • Underground Railroad routes through Ohio; paths intentionally undocumented—“never meant to be known.”
• Photographic method
  • Shoots landscapes “in the vicinity” of surviving Underground Railroad stations.
  • Images are very dark, minimal visibility, printed at large scale.
  • Forces viewers to physically slow down, eyes adjusting as if moving under cover of night.
  • Focus on “material blackness”:
  • Blackness of the subject matter (Black fugitives).
  • Blackness of the print surface itself.
• Conceptual stakes
  • Not a literal map but a re-imagining of historical experience.
  • Second installment in a broader “non-current history” series that re-envisions critical episodes in African-American life.

Working With and Against Institutions

• Insight from 1969 protest era: museums can be challenged and transformed.
• Ongoing practice
  • Uses museums as partners—funders, sites of display—but also pushes them to expand access and “extend themselves” toward surrounding communities.
  • Sees exhibitions as opportunities to reshape institutional narratives and democratize cultural space.

Ethical & Practical Implications Discussed

• Visibility vs. Invisibility of photographer:
  • Aimed to avoid the colonial gaze by acknowledging his own presence in the transaction.
• Respectful Encounter: Street photography framed as conversational, not extractive.
• Historical Responsibility: Visual work must grapple with both what happened and what could have been (lost futures).
• Community Stakeholding: Projects are often co-created with or shown to audiences historically excluded from institutional spaces.

Numerical & Temporal References Summary

• First camera obtained: $1969$ (age $16$).
• Trauma photograph encountered: $\text{Age } 11$.
• Victims in Birmingham bombing context: $4 \text{ girls} + 2 \text{ boys} = 6$.
• Temporal span embodied: $50\ \text{years}$ between $1963$ and $2013$.
• Exhibition opening: September 2013, Birmingham Museum of Art.

Recurring Motifs & Connections

• Darkness as Shelter: literal (night) and metaphorical (racial identity, institutional neglect).
• Pairing / Doubling: children vs. adults; past vs. present; object vs. experience.
• Site-Specificity: Harlem streets; Birmingham museum; Ohio safe-houses—each anchors memory within geographic reality.
• Activating Memory: Photographs function as mnemonic devices prompting viewers to confront history’s unfinished business.