Boaz Levin: Starting with your 2012 The Birmingham Project, your work has increasingly focused on African American history and memory. Since then, you seem to have moved away from the portraiture for which you had become known, turning instead toward landscape and the notion of 'place,' and its relation to collective memory. Was there a specific event or moment you can point to that led you to begin working on these questions?

Dawoud Bey: I had an epiphany in the early 2000s that really changed things for me and set me on a different path. When I was eleven years old my parents brought home a book titled The Movement, which was a book of photographs about the Civil Rights Movement. The poet and playwright Lorraine Hansberry had been commissioned to write a text that wove the pictures together and there were a number of violent pictures in the book, including lynching photographs. There was also a photograph of a young Black girl, Sarah Jean Collins, lying wounded in a hospital bed with her eyes covered with gauze bandages. She had been wounded in the dynamiting of the 16th Street Baptist Church in September 1963 by the Ku Klux Klan. That incident had killed her older sister Addie Mae Collins and three other girls, and the picture showed her in the immediate aftermath of that horrific moment as its sole survivor. Seeing that picture for the first time, it seared its way into my psyche, and I never forgot it. For a long time, I used to have nightmares about that picture. Over the years I managed to bury it somewhere in my subconscious so that I stopped thinking about it. But one morning in the early 2000s that image came rushing back to me and I suddenly sat bolt upright in bed. I don't know what shook it loose, but I realised at that moment that I hadn't really forgotten about that picture and the history that it described, and so I decided at that moment that I needed to go to Birmingham (US) and that I needed to see the place where this incident had occurred.

I'd never been to Birmingham before and didn't know anyone there, but my plan was to attend a Sunday morning service at 16th Street Baptist Church. When I arrived for the service, my sense of things was jolted. I had expected a filled-to-capacity sanctuary, a large choir and a vibrant environment. Instead, what | found was a church that on Sunday was barely one-third occupied and a sanctuary in such disrepair that the balcony level was closed because it was unsafe. After service, as I was leaving, I spoke briefly to the minister who asked me where I was from and why I had attended the service. When I mentioned to him that I was an artist and that I was looking to make work that somehow engaged the horrific history of September 15, 1963 his response left me even more unsettled: 'Listen, here at 16th Street Baptist Church we're not about all that business, we're about the business of Jesus Christ.' I realised that as I was thinking about the past, he was thinking about a very different present, which only fuelled my determination to come back and make some work that brings the history of this place into the present moment.

BL: How did the project evolve from there? And how did this inform your interest in landscape?

DB: I spent the better part of the decade visiting Birmingham trying to imagine what I could make that was equal to the weight of that horrific incident. Eventually I decided to make a group of diptych portraits, with one of a young Black person from Birmingham who was the age of one of the six young people killed that Sunday in 1963-two boys were killed in related acts of violence later that same the second portrait of an African American who was fifty years older. Putting them together as diptychs conflated past and present into an object that embodied both. In the time that I wasn't making these portraits I was driving around Birmingham with my assistant, looking at the landscape itself. History hangs heavily in the air of the Southern landscape, and I was thinking then that I wanted to continue this history-based work by looking more closely at the landscape itself.

BL: Yes, I think the reason Birmingham feels to me like such a turning point in your work is that-although formally it may be closer to your previous projects also seems to ask this 'meta question' much more explicitly: how does one represent such a traumatic event, whose traces are (ostensibly) absent from the landscape? And also, how to represent such an event in a way that doesn't relegate it to the past, but rather emphasises its hold on the present?

DB: Yes, that photograph of the wounded girl led me both into a deep engagement with history and to locating history in the landscape. Ultimately it led me to a way of conveying the idea of liminality. That the work and this history is existing in both the past and the present was something that took me several years to figure out, and this realisation provided the conceptual framework for the work as I moved on.

DB: An invitation to participate in the FRONT Triennial in Cleveland, Ohio in 2017 gave me the first extended opportunity to continue thinking about these ideas of history, memory, and landscape in relationship to a particular narrative and place, in this case Northeastern Ohio and its significance to the Underground Railroad as a final destination for formerly enslaved fugitive African Americans making their way to Lake Erie and then to freedom in Canada on the other side of Lake Erie... As I considered what the work might become, two points of reference came to mind: a poem Dream Variation by Langston Hughes and the photographs of Roy DeCarava. A couplet from that Hughes poem provided the first conceptual anchor: Night coming tenderly/Black like me This idea of nighttime or darkness, which can be seen as foreboding or threatening, being described as tender led me to think about the photographic articulation of blackness as narrative, subject, and material in DeCarava's photographs. I equated this with those fugitive African Americans moving through the Ohio landscape under cover of darkness towards ultimately freedom in Canada, which lay 50 miles across Lake Erie. Envisioning the Underground Railroad landscape through the human eye level vantage point of those moving through that landscape, I made a series of photographs that included actual and imagined sites within that landscape, photographed during various times of the day.

DB: Like DeCarava I manipulated the prints to give them the material appearance of nighttime or dusk, creating in the photographic object a rich material blackness that was coupled to the absent, but very present, Black subjects who were alluded to. This tender embrace of darkness under which the fugitive Black bodies moved added weight; the prints were very large and standing close to them the viewer's field of vision could take in only the landscape in front of them. The projects that followed Night Coming Tenderly, Black- In This Here Place and Stony the Road-continue the idea of the landscape of history as a space imagined through the eyes of the Black bodies that once inhabited those landscapes.

BL: Leo Marx described the 19th century pastoral genre as epitomising American ideology-in its imagination of a pristine landscape, which hides the transformation wrought by technology and colonisation. There's also been quite a bit of writing about the relationship between landscape and memory (perhaps best known is Simon Schama's eponymous volume, but also Ulrich Baer's important Spectral Evidence, and Georges Didi-Huberman's writing about the 'site' in Claude Lanzmann's Shoa come to mind), was that something you were thinking about?

DB: As a student of the history of photography, I was certainly aware of the landscape tradition, which in the US begins with an examination of the 19th century Western landscape photographs, dominated by the photographs of Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson. These survey photographs deceptively depict a supposedly unpopulated landscape which is in fact populated by the original Native populations. The photographs were made in the service of the Manifest Destiny, in which newly arriving European settlers claimed divine right to the land. At the same time, these photographs also established a visual photographic language for picturing the landscape, one which borrowed heavily from landscape paintings which conveyed a coded and idealised version of the landscape. I began my own landscape work with a knowledge of this problematic history and also realising that the American landscape held a more complex and often traumatic experience, especially where African Americans and Native Americans were concerned. Using the formal tropes of the genre I wanted to give voice and provoke a conversation about an aspect of the American landscape that is often overlooked, by asserting a Black presence in the conversation about landscape.

Amongst my points of reference at time was the critical writings of Tyler Green, who argues in his book Emerson's Nature and the Artists that Emerson's writings and thoughts glorified a relationship to nature and landscape through the paintings of Thomas Cole, amongst others that imposed notions of whiteness on the landscape.

DAWOUD BEY is an American photographer, filmmaker, and occasional writer living in Harlem, NY and Chicago, IL. He received his MFA in photography from Yale University School of Art (1993), where he currently serves as a Critic, as well as a Professor Emeritus at Columbia College Chicago. His photographs and films have long explored the lives and histories of underrepresented communities, bringing a rich sense of interiority to his portraits of Black Americans that defy stereotypes, and revealing an unseen narrative in the American landscape. By situating his work within the space of museums he seeks to address a history of institutional erasure. Bey's work has been exhibited internationally, with exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Getty Museum, the Barbican Center, among others. His work has been widely published, with monographs including Elegy (Virginia Museum of Fine Art/Aperture Foundation, 2023) and Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits (MACK Books, 2021). Bey is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2017), and the Berlin Prize (2026) among other honours.

BOAZ LEVIN is a Berlin-based writer, curator, and occasional filmmaker, and the co-head of Programme at the C/O Berlin Foundation. Together with Hito Steyerl and Vera Tollmann, he founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics. Levin was co-curator of the Biennale für Aktuelle Fotografie in 2017, which takes place in Heidelberg, Mannheim, and Ludwigshafen, and of the third Chennai Photo Biennale, 2021. In 2022 he co-curated Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production, which opened at MK&G Hamburg, travelling to several other venues, and which was followed by Image Ecology, shown in 2023 at C/O Berlin. In 2024, he curated Träum Weiter: Berlin, the 90s, together with Annette Hausschild. He is the curator of Dörte Eißfeldt: Archipelago, currently on view at C/O Berlin. Levin's writing has been published by Texte Zur Kunst, Camera Austria, Frieze and Cabinet Magazine. Between 2020-2023 Levin served as editor of Cabinet Magazine's online platform, Kiosk.