Ellen Maria Gorrissen Lecture

Landscape and Memory

For the past decade, Dawoud Bey has been making work that engages the American landscape and its history in relation to the African American past. These landscapes have included places with a history of Black enslavement and flight. Bey uses the familiar style of classic landscape photography to unsettle the idealized ways we often imagine these sites. Although the images show empty scenes, they carry the weight of the Black lives once shaped by these landscapes — bodies that are not pictured but are still deeply present.