Dawoud Bey, “Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky)”

#somereallygoodones, #dawoudbey, #undergroundrailroad, #langstonhughes, #salvation

Can a photograph change the world? What can change the world? Maybe it is enough that a photograph that can give hope.

Dawoud Bey is a hard working diligent artist and teacher with a long career, one of the few photographers to receive a MacArthur Fellowship genius grant. His haunting installation “Night Coming Tenderly, Black”*1 references a 1926 Langston Hughes’ poem “Dream Variations”.

“To fling my arms wide

In some place of the sun,

To whirl and to dance

Till the white day is done.

Then rest at cool evening

Beneath a tall tree

While night comes on gently,

Dark like me-

That is my dream!

“To fling my arms wide

In the face of the sun,

Dance! Whirl! Whirl!

Till the quick day is done.

Rest at pale evening...

A tall, slim tree...

Night coming tenderly

Black like me”.

-Langston Hughes “Dream Variations”, 1926

This is the artist’s well considered photographic response to the Underground Railroad and Cleveland, which was a final way station. There are fewer than a dozen landscapes installed, all printed very very darkly, in homage to Roy Decarava. We could see flashes of houses, trees, white picket fences, and Lake Erie, as escaping slaves might have desperately caught glimpses of freedom, unknown but close at hand.

The venue is the no longer active St. John’s Episcopal Church, historically an end point for the Underground Railroad. The church is modest and decaying, a unique and perfect setting, with the large framed works suspended in front of the pews, at a low height, so the viewer has to sit and lean forward to see the images, like praying.

The works seem opaque and unyielding. The viewer must commit to looking. The works required a bit of patience. In the image illustrated here, Bey recreates the point of view and low light a passenger would have endured, at last, to experience the open waterscape. This was a place of salvation and seemingly limitless future — imagine — and a dazzling balancing act by the artist, and one can dance and whirl as the poem says. The experience is haunted and haunting, enlightened and enlightening. These are photographs of salvation.

*1 In 2017 Bey was commissioned to make a site specific project for the first edition of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.

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