Further explore the exhibition’s theme of semi-visibility through a slow-looking exercise related to this work.

Transcript
Narrator: This lushly dark black-and-white photo, "Untitled #14 (Site of John Brown’s Tannery)," is from the 2017 series "Night Come Tenderly, Black." Dawoud Bey’s photo evokes twilight. There is just enough light to make out most of the details, though some features have become soft smudges of gray and black. A wide, neatly trimmed lawn dotted with a few fallen oak leaves leads to the back of a two-story white wood home with open black shutters on the first-floor windows. No lights are on within. The house is surrounded by low-growing shrubs, oak trees (some of which are leafless or nearly bare), and tall hemlocks, their lengthy branches dripping with tiny, pointed leaves.

The viewer is drawn to the house because it is brighter than the encircling foliage; however, the building is photographed from such a distance that it occupies only a small fraction of the image. The emphasis is on the space it takes to reach it, rather than the house itself. Thick clouds fill the sky, with one small parting directly above the house, the edges of which are lit by a bright spot of light as if from a full moon that would peek out if a breeze were to pull the clouds past.

The camera angle is low, creating the sensation that the photographer was crouched or lying on his belly to capture the home of abolitionist John Brown, much how people seeking freedom on the Underground Railroad may have lay waiting at a distance for the sun to fall lower before emerging into open spaces. While the exact direction enslaved people would have come to this property is a secret, the viewer can imagine approaching from this very spot, vulnerable as they cross the lawn and embraced upon passing the trees and reaching the home.

The photo series’ name was inspired by the 1926 Langston Hughes poem “Dream Variations,” the last lines of which are, “Night coming tenderly / Black like me,” in which Hughes references resting in the evening away from the “white day” by a “tall, slim tree.” One can imagine the towering hemlock tree closest to the house in this photo would be just such a tree.

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