A CALLING FROM ON HIGH —IN WITNESS TO A LAMENT
by Michelle Lanier
She was sitting in the balcony, she said.
Her son tapped her on the shoulder, she said.
Whispering.
He told her this.
This is where the enslaved sat.
And her tears came down.
The rest is a river,
not of tears, but a river
of footsteps,
of woodland graves,
of naked quartz,
of lichen-bathed boulders,
of misty roads held back on both sides
by kudzu and crops
dead and rising in silence.
Her turn now
It was silence Linda tapped on the shoulder to say this:
Humans were held like birds, right here, just right here.
There is a sound called heartbreak, called slavery, too often unnamed by whiteness.
In pursuit of the unnamed, heartbreak sounds in hidden southlands,with a determination to see the people, who hid behind stone walls, and under hand-hewn heart pine,something else emerged from these wandering roads.
She found behind her outrage, beneath her hunger for a new, new southern world, behind her own breastplate,she found her ancestors,complicit and now contrite through her, pulsing and watching her way of watching,her way of hearing the names.
Again and again, the names.Alongside “bushels of corn, bushels of wheat, cattle, and bacon.”Rising like a million suns –
Dianah.
Will.
Jack.
Elias.
Daisy.
Phobe.
Charlotte.and Young Charlotte.
Sylvia
—
Charity.
Andrew.
Enoch.
Cisar.
Daniel.
Elize.
And. And. And –
perhaps they led all of us here,even you.
We have all come to this very and exacting moment,to listen.The unnamed are calling up from behind the granite wall of the old, Black cemetery, trumpeting their own souls as more human than human,eternal echoes from ones called property, more powerful than the avarice of so-called ownership.
They sing out their own unnamed names over the still-tainted tributaries of human extraction, the crop harvests of blood, from souls someone loved.
They are calling and called.
—
What were their basket names? What did their sweethearts call them in the night?
By what name did their grandbabies know them as?
—
I sang to them, in the woods where they rested, I poured water.I placed mints from her candy tin, at their front gate, at the back gate of the white cemetery.
This is where the woods sighed a welcome, rustling with a too-hot breeze, a too-hot grief, a too-hot power to speak across this heaven and this earth. There were children, can you imagine? There were children laughing like bells.
—
Light spilled bright as mirror glass covered in honey and song. A great-winged black bird swirled above us,above the witness trees. Osun.
I brought a parasol for the sun.Both of us in black, but not mourning.
Both of us firefighting in the spirit realm.
We spoke of family, of wounds, of how the striped bass we ate was better than we could have imagined. I wonder, now, how it looked alive and wet with river water.
I wonder, now, if the souls we honored that day feasted as we feasted.
We held the other’s gaze in that same church pew where her river began, the one the Black folks left after the war.
I didn’t disguise the power we hold, us freeborn children of those called property.She didn’t flinch in our flame.
I could see:She came to bring a gift for
Dianah.
Will.
Jack.
Elias.
Daisy.
Phobe.
Charlotte. and Young Charlotte.
Sylvia
—
Charity.
Andrew.
Enoch.
Cisar.
Daniel.
Elize.
And. And. And —
And here it is.
In your hands, dear reader.
Here it is.
It’s in your hands now,
dear reader.
READING THE LANDSCAPE, LISTENING TO ITS STORIES
by Jennifer Sudul Edwards, PhD
It is through this lens looking back in time, that somehow, we can begin to see ourselves and be reminded that we are all woven into this social fabric of time, history, and life.
— LINDA FOARD ROBERTS
The South has a particular style: verdant landscapes, seductively drawling dialects, a specific social structure and moral code. Regardless of your physical relationship or experience with the South, you probably have an idea about it: the antebellum opulence, cascading kudzu, the persistent exploitation of Black bodies. This narrative isolates the South from the rest of the United States. This challenging perception of “the Dirty South,” also gives it allure, makes it a tourist draw, a romanticized ideal for the endemic struggles of the United States from the country’s complicated birth out of violence to its present paralyzing tensions. Sally Mann, one of the photographers most closely linked with contemporary images of a romanticized South, posits that the fascination stems from the persistent residue of the Civil War. In her collection Deep South, she recalls a British visitor explaining that there remains “the lingering aftertaste of defeat. . . Pain, he concluded, is a dimension of old civilizations; the South has it, the rest of the United States does not.”1
Photography has helped to illustrate this narrative of the South. In the foreword for the excellent catalogue from the exhibition A Long Arc: Photography and the American South, High Museum of Art director Rand Suffolk avers that, since it arrived in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century around the time of the Civil War, photography has developed in conjunction with the South’s own evolution. This includes Matthew Brady’s stoic Union generals; Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan’s battlefields (O’Sullivan’s staged Gettysburg photographs introduced the slippage between subjective and documentary photography); Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White’s Depression-era images of gaunt, threadbare Americans out of work and out of step with the American Dream; Consuela Kanaga and Gordon Parks’s determined Black laborers, a few generations removed from slavery but still facing racism’s economic and violent constrictions; the Swiss Robert Frank’s outsider’s take on Southern society divided by class and color, even a century after the Civil War; violent clashes and determined dignity in the Civil Rights era captured by Danny Lyons, Don Hogan Charles, and Ernest Withers; and William Eggleston’s poignant, poetic images containing the beauty of a crumbling landscape, colors and textures diffused by the onslaught of the organically wild.
As a genre, landscape photography offers a particular tool for mending a complexly broken situation. It is abstract enough that meaning unfolds slowly and personally, through long looking and interpretation, and literal enough that the primary subject is unavoidable. The image may include a rolling field, rustic buildings, flora and fauna, but not immediately seen is what that setting has absorbed—the history of the place, the bodies that worked the land and died there, the families that lived and left. Whether rendered in romanticized soft focus or aggressively confrontational clarity, landscapes allow a particularly nuanced reading of complicated situations. Add the sensual tones and textures of the gelatin silver process to lure a viewer in and you have set a perfect snare.
The cat-and-mouse dynamic between artist and viewer is especially fraught with photography. The photography historian and social critic Giselle Freund observed that the images we see are those that describe the experiences and ethics of those in power: “More than any other medium, photography is able to express the values of the dominant social class and to interpret events from that class’s point of view, for photography, although strictly linked with nature, has only an illusory objectivity.”2 I believe that Freund’s “those in power” could relate to two possible people—those with economic, political, or social standing and those with the camera. Freund, like her peer and contemporary Susan Sontag, reminds viewers that the images we consider are shaped, cropped, and presented by the crafting hand and sensibility of the artist. A photograph is not a neutral snapshot of reality but a contrived, considered construction by a person with a point of view.
Linda Foard Roberts’s photography is steeped in history and landscape. Her work for the last thirty years focuses on trees, lakes, fields, and woods as her obvious subject matter. Even her portraits of her family and the studio shots she choreographs study that slippage between the figurative and the natural world—a body touching a tree branch, disintegrating bird bones, hands holding cocoons. She grew up in a city (Charlotte, North Carolina) with centuries-old woods and fields a quick walk away. That lifelong connection to the landscape imbued her with a sense of the history embedded therein, how that land symbolizes the problematic complications endemic to the South and native to a multi-generational Southerner.
Foard Roberts’s intimacy with the land and the history of the South imparts her photographs with a distinct but often overlooked dynamic of landscapes: their ability to slip between genres, from historical to still life to portraiture. The trees in her Grounded series transmogrify into sentient sentinels, witnesses to both violence and tenderness, over the centuries. When we see these elder statemen, we cannot help but think, as Deborah Willis remarks, of the ballad Strange Fruit made famous by Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and its lines “Southern trees bear a strange fruit/blood on the leaves and blood on the root/black body swinging in the Southern breeze.”3 Willis recognizes immediately that “Roberts invites us to see beyond that which is visible, and her images lend themselves to fluid interpretations. As I explore her dreamy, impressionistic photographs, I find both family and racial memory in subtle interplay—mine as well as hers.”4 Willis follows Foard Roberts’s lead from nature study into a reckoning with the traumatic past of inhumanity in the United States, one that is often associated with the South but, in fact, defines every state in the union.
The connection between historic human actions and landscape compositions can be seen throughout Foard Roberts’s work. Her lakes, suffused with mist and branches like fingers extending tentatively into the frame, remind of the land’s stoic quietude through all. The portraits of her children—such as Measure of Time, Both Thirteen Years Old, in which the tree’s branches consume a child and Naturae with a branch delicately encircling her son’s clavicle—remind of us how nature embodies human history and, even in youth, wraps us in its restrictive grasp. We cannot escape it but must coexist, grow, within it. It may encircle us, but it doesn’t mean it constricts us. In the new series Lament, Foard Roberts takes this theme and pulls it to the surface, looking at the contemporary landscape as a record of prejudice and enslavement from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement to the current tensions between recognition, reconciliation, and regression, urgent issues that long extended beyond the Mason-Dixon line.
Foard Roberts’s relationship to the Southern landscape parallels that of Sally Mann. Mann’s early work also records her children’s arc through maturity on their Virginia farm until gradually the landscape became the central figure for Mann. She wrote:
Living in the South often means slipping out of temporal joint, a peculiar phenomenon that I find both nourishes and wounds. To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty.5
Photographing landscapes allowed Mann to reflect entirely and succinctly on her Southern heritage, which she recognized as central to her project. She sought territories with a violent history, mostly relating to Black freedom. There are the the series like Battlegrounds, which includes Antietam [fig. 1], the site of one of the earliest battles of the Civil War and one of the bloodiest, with over 22,000 casualties in a single day. Mann presents the field in partially obscured views, with sharp points of focus surrounded by or buried under heavily blurred haloes of shadow and painterly swipes of silver, reminding us of the artist’s presence while simultaneously evoking a centuries-old aesthetic. In Deep South, there are the complicated compositions of the riverbank where white men submerged Emmett Till’s beaten, lynched body [fig. 2]. After visiting the site, Mann wrote, “How could a place so fraught with historical pain appear to be so ordinary?”6 To upend the normalcy of her record of the Mississippi site, Mann composes an image that denies the viewer any spot of rest: an entry point that sinks into an open wound of earth, the destabilizing reverse reflections in the water of a blurred bank in the background, the abrupt, jagged cropping of the image. There is no symmetry, no stable surface, no comfort afforded us.
The resulting images emanate haunted, hallowed ground. The visual does not explicitly relay what happened, even though the brutal murder of Emmett Till continues to imprint our present. This is the challenge of photographing the Southern landscape. That very act creates a metaphor for the tension in the United States, one that vacillates between selective amnesia and exhausting Groundhog Day-like repetition. These subjects allow Mann to explore her identity as a Southerner while metaphorically presenting the reality that the region’s history of enslaving and suppressing people of color remains a defining characteristic, an intrinsic part of its legacy, even if sometimes—from distance, time, or denial—this history becomes completely obscured or easily denied.
Dawoud Bey also considers the possibilities of landscape to embody images of those absent. Bey became well known for his perceptive, peering portraits of Black people, but over the last two decades, he has depicted sites of the United States intensely intertwined with the country’s history of enslavement. Whether he photographs Harlem or Ohio, Bey states that his pictures “still look at the Black subject but through landscape and place, the way that history is embedded in the physical firmament of this country.”7
While Mann’s photographs slip between legibility and occlusion using focus and chemical swipes, Bey’s images are resolute in their clarity and straightforward in their composition. Bey says that his goal was to, “engage the idea of the way in which that history enacted on, with, and through Black bodies has a kind of residue that clings to the land. My ambition for all three projects is to take that invisible history—that history that has now been reduced, if you will, to just the unpopulated landscape—and make that resonate, make it breathe using a subjective visual and material vocabulary.”8
While Untitled (Picket Fence and Farmhouse) [fig. 3] may be difficult to read initially; the image is clearly legible once our eyes adjust to the darkness. From Bey’s series Night coming tenderly, Black, the image shows us what an escaped enslaved person would have seen traveling on a moonless night on the Underground Railroad in Ohio, the subject of the series.
Conversely, photographs from Stoney the Road consistently offer the viewer an easy entry into the composition; even titles such as Untitled (Light on the Trail) [fig. 4] imply an offer of ease and guidance. In this image, the path is cleared, one can see deep into the wood that there is easy passage, the details of the foliage and soft shadows could not be more welcoming. Yet, this path, now called the Richmond Slave Trail, is the passage for the largest trafficking of African bodies in the United States from 1830 to 1860.
Coming upon a farmhouse at night, a well-trodden path in the woods—for Bey, the goal is to “activate the imagination around these particular landscapes, which still have deep meaning.”9 Coining the term “subjective opticality” to explain how photography and film allow for this, Bey explains what it means: “Using the lens to reinterpret what the experience not only might have felt like
but also what it might have looked like. I’m very interested in how the lens can be used subjectively to reinscribe physical experience into something that we will never see with our eyes.”10 Bey’s subjective opticality elucidates how the tool of production—the camera lens—becomes a metaphorical device in photography’s ability to reveal the unseen.
Foard Roberts investigates this as well, merging the temporal life of her machinery with the era she seeks to capture through it. Her camera lens—a nineteenth-century Darlot Brass Barrel—is coated with one hundred and fifty years of dust and debris. The congested lens, with its fixed aperture, allows for a single, sharply focused center in a shallow depth of field from which the rest of the image emerges, softly dissipating into tonal values that hint at details instead of explicitly recording them. “I was searching for a lens that conveyed emotion,” Foard Roberts writes, “not just a document. I see these imperfections as a challenge to work through, not an obstacle.”11 Her eight-by-ten-inch view camera, large and cumbersome, requires physical manipulation and patience, qualities long removed from photography in our contemporary era. Positioning the camera on its spindly tripod in front of a scene, she removes the lens cap and waits, measuring time with instinct, reading light instead of a shutter speed. Foard Roberts listens to the landscape and learns from it—its physical presence and its invisible history—as she makes her image.
In the 1930s as the world spiraled to war, the renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson complained that landscape photographers like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams were not using their art for the humanitarian cause: “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!”12 Yet, that can be the very form of communication that allows us to finally begin some of the most difficult conversations shaping our world. Slavery’s legacy, just one example of humanity’s inhumanity, is not limited to the South; it relates to all of us, throughout the world. Through their respective projects, Bey, a Black man from Queens, New York; Foard Roberts, a white woman descended from slaveholders; and Mann, raised in the Jim Crow South, are united by this common theme: what has passed may not be visible, but every event remains embedded in our surroundings. We can choose not to see it, to talk about it, but it is as present and connected to us as the ground beneath our feet.
ENDNOTES
1. Sally Mann, Deep South (New York, Boston: Bullfinch Press, 2005) 7.
2. Giselle Freund, Photography and Society (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980) 40.
3. Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, “Strange Fruit,” from the poem published in 1937.
4. Deborah Willis in Linda Foard Roberts, Passage (Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2017) 18.
5. Deep South, 7.
6. Ibid, 52.
7. Dawoud Bey in Valerie Cassel Oliver, Dawoud Bey: Elegy (New York: Aperture, 2023) 149.
8. Ibid, 151.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid, 156.
11. Email with the artist, November 3, 2024.
12. Cited in Lucy Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West (New York: The New Press, 2013) 8–9.fig. 3 Dawoud Bey, Untitled (Picket Fence and Farmhouse), 2017, gelatin silver print, 44 × 55 inches (111.8 × 139.7 cm); © Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
fig. 4 Dawoud Bey, Untitled (Light on the Trail), 2022, gelatin silver print mounted to Dibond, 44 × 55 inches (111.8 × 139.7 cm); © Dawoud Bey
Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
fig. 1 Sally Mann, Battlefields, Untitled, Antietam (Black Sun), 2001, gelatin silver print with diatomaceous earth varnish, 40 × 50 inches (101.6 × 127 cm); © Sally Mann, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian
fig. 2 Sally Mann, Deep South, Untitled (Emmett Till River Bank), 1998,
ABERRATIONS OF MEMORY
by Cheryl Finley, PhD
The South cleaves toward old ways. But these are not old times, and this distinction is crucial to understand. The South is not “backwards”; it is palimpsestic and ritualistic, filled with people living the ravages of history. Revision and transformation are possible; however, that replay requires new ways of seeing.1
— IMANI PERRY
Linda Foard Roberts’s Lament offers “new ways of seeing,” as scholar Imani Perry urges. Roberts’s work is a moving photographic intervention that acknowledges how shared histories of pain and suffering have the power to heal, transform, and renew the nation in an effort to deliver the promise of a greater humanity. Her lush yet haunting black-and-white photographs reveal palpable sites of memory steeped in the history of slavery in the American South—landscapes, churches, pathways, and foliage—introducing the viewer to images of a shared national trauma that is, at the same time, intimately tied to her own family history. Lament began when Roberts and her family attended a service at Providence Presbyterian Church in Charlotte. Her son quietly mentioned that they were sitting in the same balcony pews where the enslaved had sat 160 years earlier. For Roberts, the tangibility of the past had never felt so close to the present as it did in that moment. The work continued to evolve and deepen— through archival and familial research, Roberts, who grew up in North Carolina during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, traced her connection to the land where her ancestors settled from Northern Europe in the eighteenth century and were rumored to have enslaved people. A personal reckoning emerged through historical deeds, archival photographs, postal maps, and family records that led the artist to search for land in North and South Carolina, as well as a desire to bear witness throughout the dense and ominous natural landscape that has troubled this region of the American South for far too long.
PRECURSORS
Other photographic artists of note have taken the American South to task. Whether it’s Walker Evans’s acclaimed documentary images from Let Us Now Praise American Men (1941), in which his portraits of Black churches stand out, or the work of a handful of Farm Security Administration photographers (1935–42), including Gordon Parks. More recently, in the past nearly thirty years, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta has staged exhibitions of note focusing attention on how to see and understand the deep divisions that still permeate the American South through photography, including the critically acclaimed exhibition A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 (2023–24) and the museum’s pioneering initiative Picturing the South, begun in 1996, which commissioned sixteen photographers from around the world to photograph aspects of the American South over twenty-five years.2 Among these, Sally Mann’s sultry black-and-white images from her series Deep South (2005) and Southern Landscape (2013) feature heavy landscapes similar to those depicted by Roberts, and Sheila Pree Bright’s Invisible Empire series (2019), taken in the shadow of the Stone Mountain, has inclinations towards racial understanding and healing as Roberts’s work does. Yet, as Roberts insists, Lament both appeals to shared histories of possession, violence, and identity formation, and empathically and deeply operates on a personal level.
THIS IS PERSONAL
The personal nature of Roberts’s practice is conveyed viscerally through her images’ emotional appeal, as well as through her clear and intentional naming of them. Her choice to photograph southern churches stands out in that her images aren’t solely of these venerable sanctuaries’ exteriors, as in the work of Evans or Mann, suggesting distance, documentation, or architectural study. Rather, for Roberts, the appeal of these places of worship has to do with the complex histories of exclusion and division that are secreted within, as well as the expansive landscapes surrounding them. Take Machpelah Church in Iron Station, North Carolina, seemingly physically unchanged, according to the artist, since its construction in 1848 in the Greek Revival style. Let us examine her close attention to this church, in which she provides an extended meditation on the racialized use of space and access to worship. It was here that Roberts photographed with care the segregated balcony seating area, where Black parishioners were relegated to sit apart from whites below, climbing stairs to a cramped space with low ceiling clearance, elevated heat levels and poor sightlines to the pulpit. Her camera captures these limitations on worship despite Black parishioners’ desire to be in communion with the Lord, even in the space of division, dispossession, and discomfort.
WHAT IS IN A NAME?
Moreover, the explicit titles assigned by Roberts to these works evoke the painful histories of exclusion, beginning with a wide-angle exterior view of the brick church building, Balcony Visible from Exterior (2019) [vol. 1, p. 56], which catches a glimpse of the architectural apparatus of the balcony through an 18-lite window, while also showing the two, side-by-side entrances to the building. But it is inside of this building, bereft with pain and suffering, that Roberts really goes to work! When photographing the low-ceilinged balcony, her closely cropped images give the sense of claustrophobia and constraint in Ascension (to Injustice), showing the turning stairwell up to the balcony [vol. 1, pp. 58–59]; Bearer of Weight, alluding to the burden of history [vol. 1, pp. 52, 55]; and Half Light, narrowly letting in just a glimmer of light at the top of the foreshortened window [vol. 1, p. 57]. With her discerning eye and healing heart, Roberts takes the viewer by the hand and guides them through Machpelah Church, enabling them to sense this hefty past. Her incisive photographs sharply call out the uncomfortable, historic divide based on race and fulfilled through architectural design in Divided Worship and Unseen [vol. 1, pp. 64, 62–63]. In these images, the artist takes a step back to show the balcony and the lower gallery, revealing how the space is laterally bifurcated, and with intention. Song of Sorrow [vol. 1, p. 61], motioning to the pulpit, cries out to acknowledge the spiritual toll of such division.
ABERRATIONS OF MEMORY
The role of memory is key here, as is Roberts’s use of it as an aesthetic tool. For her, recognition of these memories envelops her images and her camera’s approach to slowly revealing them. With intention and care, Roberts has sought answers in these sites using a simple photographic apparatus aligned with the times, an eight-by-ten-inch view camera with a Darlot brass barrel lens from the Civil War era.3 This historical lens, in which a lens cap is simply removed and replaced to make an exposure, captures the feeling she wishes to convey, delivering an emotion beyond just seeing. With simple operation—no shutter speed, no F-stop—it offers a window into the past and enables the viewer to focus on the image presented within its circumference. This has the visual effect of zeroing in on what the artist deems crucial for the eye to see, to discern, to understand, to feel. The slow fade, darkening to the edges, trains our eyes to focus on what is real, what is pertinent, what we need to know, see, and understand.
Linda Foard Roberts’s seasoned talent and preference for the Darlot lens expands when she takes us out of doors, along the pathways, into the fields, past centuries-old trees and stone walls to experience the tactile nature of these sites of memory in the American South related to the history of slavery. As the artist shares, “Each site was selected by a desire to witness and get close to this history.” As we have seen, in North Carolina, where Roberts grew up, she has captured how architecture and the experience of space in the segregated Machpelah Church have consequences for us still today. Indeed, the lasting scars of slavery, division, bigotry, and Jim Crow are amplified in her photographs from Charlotte, North Carolina, where she provides a window into the biting violence of division, unforgiving in worship, as in Segregated Balcony (2016) [vol. 1, p. 17], showing the separate and unequal site of worship for Black parishioners, and Divided in Death (2016) [vol. 1, pp. 10–11], where an ancient stone wall parses a burial ground by race.
In South Carolina, Roberts aimed her Darlot lens on the landscape and luscious plant life characteristic of the region. Palm trees, live oaks, and other commanding yet haunting trees are draped with Spanish moss as if to hide the crimes of racialized violence, of lynching, on the one hand, or instead, to secret away the vast number of formerly enslaved people who chose to self-emancipate into the wild of the Carolinas and Sea Islands landscape, on the other. Roberts’s portraits of this landscape become especially poignant through her use of the Darlot lens, which, due to its historic, early nineteenth-century design, creates a sense of movement, a loss of focus in the background and a suggestion for the eye to see the aberrations, “spherical, coma, astigmatism, distortions, etc., which this lens design would not be able to suppress.”4 The tenuous balance between history and memory exhibited in Roberts’s photographs is amplified by her choice of site and the Darlot lens’s refusal toward clarity and straight documentation.
Roberts’s photographic investigation in South Carolina exposes the basic and barren living quarters formerly occupied by enslaved people made of wood planks with no-paned glass windows as seen in Window with Latch (2018) and Charred Floor (2018) [vol. 1, pp. 86, 73]. She shows the symmetry of these dwellings’ alignment within a specific area of the plantations she has documented, Magnolia and McLeod respectively, as well as the ubiquity of this architecture of labor and domination in the South. Indeed, there were many more dwellings like these. Take for example, Arthur Rothstein’s Girl at Gee’s Bend, South Carolina (1937), an iconic work from the Farm Security Administration (1935–42) in which a photograph of a young woman peering out of a window was instrumental in uplifting people in need.
Roberts’s gift lies in her empathetic approach to her subject. This is easily grasped, felt by viewers as she creates immersive portraits of the environment in which they can imagine themselves and the past lives of others. She conveys both the majesty of the landscape and its immense capacity to hide, heal, and transform. Take, for example, New Growth and Silent Witness from the Underground Railroad series begun in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2017 [vol. 1, pp. 106, 101]. These dramatic portraits of trees suggest a certain capacity to hold dear the passage of time, of history and forbearance, of future possibility. Other works from the series taken in Jamestown (2017–18) and Highpoint, North Carolina (2022) convey the landscape’s welcome, to provide safe passage as in Windswept Trees (2022) [vol. 1, pp. 120–121]. Roberts, through her treatment of architecture, notably her invitation to the viewer to climb winding sets of stairs and see through paned windows in the Underground Railroad images, again underscores the trials and secrecy of the escape to freedom.
Moved by recent discovery of her ancestors’ ties to slavery, Roberts seeks, in her photographs and writing, to demonstrate how images, rich in their care for the land and historical sites, can confront the lament that still so troubles the nation, structurally, socially, and spiritually. Her complex images generously guide us to understanding and acknowledgment of a shared history, releasing their power to transform the way that history can heal and offer a way forward.
ENDNOTES
1. Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (New York: Ecco, 2022).
2. To mark the 25th anniversary of the High Museum’s Picturing the South initiative, begun in 1996, an exhibition of the same name was mounted at the museum in fall 2021. A collection of more than 300 photographs about the American South was amassed due to this effort.
3. Linda Foard Roberts, personal email communication, August 7, 2024: “Darlot was a French optical company founded in the 1850s as Jamin-Darlot in Paris. In 1860, it became Darlot. It made camera lenses marked ‘Darlot, Opticien’ or ‘Darlot Paris’ and the initials ‘AD’ of Alphonse Darlot, the letters crossed as a logo.”
4. W. Lungov, Darlot B. F. & Co., Only Images, October 24, 2024, accessed November 6, 2024, https://apenasimagens.com/en/darlot-b-f-co-petzval/
THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST, IN THE PRESENT
by Henry Louis Gates Jr., PhD
Whenever we treat an identity as something to be fenced off from those of another identity, we sell short the human imagination. People can successfully project themselves into the lives of others. That is what art is meant to do—cross boundaries, engender empathy with other people, bridge the differences between author and reader, one human and another.
When I sit down with my guests in our PBS series, Finding Your Roots, as I am about to walk them up the branches of their family tree, the very first thing that I share with them is something deeply personal to me, a belief that I have about the role our ancestors have played, and continue to play, in our lives. I start by inviting them to join me back in time at the Temple of Delphi in Ancient Greece. Although I am not a scholar of classical antiquity, I have been fascinated by Athens and Sparta since elementary school, really, and especially by the Temple of Delphi, home of the Delphic Oracle, which my wife and I had the pleasure of visiting two summers ago.
Of the 147 mottoes inscribed on the temple’s walls, the most famous, certainly, is “Know Thyself.” I believe, I say to my guests about to venture into their ancestral past, that knowing about our ancestors is key to knowing about ourselves. As one of my heroes, the great Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking stated so eloquently about the relation between the past and our identity, “It is the past that tells us who we are. Without it, we lose our identity.” I then say that “I am here to introduce you to your past.”
After ten seasons of filming guests for Finding Your Roots, I have come to believe that our ancestors are suspended in a sort of genealogical purgatory, as it were, and the job of our research team is to locate those vaults in which they are suspended and open them. When we open those vaults, our ancestors tell us their stories, stories that our guests soon discover have trickled down the branches of their family tree, magically, in a genealogical form of transmission. One way to think of this process might be “ancestral osmosis,” though that isn’t exactly how osmosis works biologically. But that might be a good metaphor to describe the curious process of inheritance that each individual’s ancestral legacy “leaves behind,” as the expression goes, but in this case perhaps more accurately yields forward to us, our ancestors’ descendants. So perhaps a better way to put it would be that our ancestors’ legacy cascades down the branches of our family trees like Spanish moss, informing who we become. Linda Foard Roberts, in fact, employs a similar metaphor for the way in which the past haunts and, indeed, infects the present, when she writes that “Underneath sprawling, decadent vines, the past remains.”
The process that I am trying to describe is also present in our genes. We actually have a 90 percent chance of sharing DNA with people who are your eighth-generation ancestors or closer. If we define a generation as thirty years, as most scholars and genealogists do, this time period is almost the age of the United States! And to help to put this number in perspective, just going back to our fourth great-grandparents, each of us has sixty-four of those, so we all have considerably more ancestors on our family trees if we trace back 240 years, 256 in fact.
In this sense, our ancestors, though they have long ago left this earth, have not ceased to exist entirely. Not at all. In fact, those from within this time frame have contributed some DNA to our genomes. I like to think of our genomes as walking family trees, repositories of genetic memory.
I cite the way that genetic memory, as it were, works because it is very similar to the photographic journey upon which Roberts has embarked in his beautiful book. Lament, as she so poignantly describes it, is a powerfully compelling attempt to show her readers “the palpable presence of our shared past in everyday life,” recalling William Faulkner’s famous observation that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” “Markers of the past,” Roberts notes so perceptively, “exist all around us, sometimes hidden but always detectable,” always discoverable, always recoverable, if we look closely and carefully enough, as Roberts has so masterfully done in the marvelous photographic essay that, in image after image, depicts these very markers.
Whereas my work is concerned with genealogical memory, hers is with “the geography of memory,” rendered here in the astonishingly telling black-and-white photographs that she has created using nineteenth-century photographic technology, the perfect way to reveal “the overlays of evidence of our past and present,” by unveiling “the existence of partially hidden histories in the visible world that we may encounter every day, yet fail to recognize as portals to another era.”
Near the end of her deeply moving introductory essay, Roberts says that, from time to time, she has “wondered if I am the right person to document these markers” that tie together the present with the past, markers “sometimes disguised,
This book would not have been possible without generous support from:
THE JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION
WELLS FARGO FOUNDATION
A portion of the proceeds from sales of photographs from this project will be donated to the Equal Justice Initiative, which includes the Legacy Museum, a museum for the history of racial inequality, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection, both in Montgomery, Alabama. A portion of the proceeds will also go to support the Slave Dwelling Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing resources to preserve African American slave dwellings. Lastly, a portion of the proceeds will go toward helping to erect a memorial for the enslaved cemetery at Providence Presbyterian Church, where the work began.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you for holding this book in your hands and for allowing the words and images to resonate with you. I hope Lament will advance ongoing efforts to make a sometimes seemingly ineffable history tangible. I have seen how such efforts create opportunities for change—for both compassion and action.
This project was only possible through the collective counsel, support, guidance, and generosity of spirit of many, many people. I want to begin by acknowledging all those who came before me, the multitude of artists, photo-graphers, writers, storytellers, film directors, and curators who have continued to bear witness to our country’s tragic history and who believed in a better world, cultural reform, healing, and new possibilities.
There are no words to express my gratitude for the incredible people who supported me and this work in countless ways. I remain humbled and honored. There are several inspirational scholars who, without them, this project would not have been possible. I extend a deep and heartfelt thank you to Dr. Deborah Willis, PhD., whose initial support, encouragement, and advice were invaluable to me. Thank you for your continued guiding hand and your important work. Thank you to Dr. Jennifer Sudul Edwards, PhD., for your early curatorial inclusion of this work and your deep and meaningful contextualizing essay. Thank you also to author Michelle Lanier for sharing your gifts through your collaborative spirit, journeying to Charlotte to bear witness together, and thoroughly understanding the origins of this work for me. Your words are an essential guide to reading the images. Thank you, Cheryl Finley, PhD., for your inspirational essay for this work and for your powerful wisdom and insights. Thank you to Henry Louis Gates Jr., PhD., for offering your revelations of personal history and how we are all woven together. Thank you to Ethelbert Miller for writing and sharing your meaningful poem, A Bend in the River.
I express my deepest gratitude to David Chickey at Radius Books for your belief in the work, immense patience, and genius gift of design. I am humbled and honored to work with you. Nick Larsen, I am deeply grateful for your extraordinary editorial eye and careful and thoughtful attention to the meaning within the work. I extend a huge thank you to everyone at Radius: Isabella Beroutsos, Paige Serra Reitz, Kiera O’Brien, and Inga Hendrickson, who continue to champion so many artists.
The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation’s belief in the project has been invaluable encouragement for completing this work. Thank you for your unwavering commitment and support of artists during critical times in their careers.
I am profoundly humbled and grateful to the wonderful and compassionate Jay Everette. A Wells Fargo Grant supports this book and the placement of photographs in museums as part of their equity and justice mission.
Thank you to Steve and Katrice Boland, as well as Brian Siegel, for your support and introduction to Skip Gates and for your belief in this work. Allen Blevins, I am deeply grateful for your passionate and continued support of so many artists.
I am deeply grateful to Chandra Johnson, owner of SOCO Gallery, for her continued vision, wisdom, and support. Thank you to Hilary Burt, Catherine Ann Bergstrom, Gabbi Sarussi, Emma Henry, and Anne Marie Weekley Coyle; I am grateful for your continued support of my work.
A huge thank you to Brian Stevenson for your tireless work and for sharing your four points to a better world, illuminating a path for me throughout the project.
Rhea Combs’s advice on seeking my voice was vital, and Mark Klett’s encouragement of understanding where we come from is critical to our work as artists.
I want to thank Byron Baldwin for setting me on my path of telling stories through the lens of a camera. Thank you to Crista Cammaroto for the important conversations and endless counsel throughout the years. Alison Lee, thank you for the tireless encouragement, insight, and advice and for introducing me to caretakers, who have become a critical component of the work.
John Love, your friendship, guidance, and words—”History is tangible, to heal we must touch it”—are a source of necessary strength and inspiration. Susan Kae Grant and Mary Virginia Swanson’s counsel have always been a guiding light. Thank you, Tobia Makeover for inviting me to Ossabaw Island on your sacred journey there. Thank you, Mark Sloan for your invaluable advice and encouragement. Titus Brooks Heagins, thank you for the deep and compelling conversations and for giving your photographic talents. Thank you to Tanja Bechtler for your friendship and support. Debi Cornwall, thank you for being a source of inspiration. There are many for whom I am grateful for the encouraging conversations, steering advice, support, and strength. Thank you to Lia Newman, Sabina Schlumberger, Brad Thomas, Dan Estabrook, Jamila Brown, Megan Mulry, Liz Faison, B. E. Noel, Sidney Logan Echevarria, Juan and Jonelle Logan, Monica King, Marleen De Bode Olivie, Jonathan Walz, Gregory Harris, Gavin Edwards, Margaret Stratton, Cheryl Younger, Janelle Lynch, Jessica Gaynelle Moss, Malik Norman, Renee McColl, Charlotte Wickham, Beth Hecimovich, Kathleen Robbins, Holly Linton, and Carolyn DeMeritt. Nancy Mamlin and Emma Calabrese, thank you for the technical guidance.
I am grateful to all the locations and guides who welcomed and guided me on the grounds, allowing me to stand and bear witness to these properties and offering the power of place: Anne Wood, Gale Kinney, Fran Lapolla, Walter Clark, Kirk Brown, Emily David Hendrix, Molly Sherman, Sydney Miller, Shawn Rogers, Raul Cardona, and Jeff Atkins, among others. This was profoundly important for the work. Thank you to Joseph McGill of the Slave Dwelling Project for showing us the importance of the power of place and for your inspiring work. Lynn Teague and Dawn Funk, thank you for your guidance while I searched for my roots.
On a personal note, I want to express my gratitude to those who provided continued support and hours of counsel and sometimes just listened to me as I found my way. My incredibly supportive mother, Joan Foard; my sister Catherine Sherard and her family; my brothers Dickie and Gary and their families; Mark Roberts and Cheryl Childress families, your support was invaluable to me.
A resounding and unequivocal thank you to my husband, George Roberts, for his wisdom, support, patience, camera assistance, and documentation and for allowing me to lean on you during times of doubt. My children, Nicole, George, Logan, and his wife Witney, who have given me the most meaning in my life, for their generation will continue to be the change we want to see in the world.
CONTRIBUTORS
Jen Sudul Edwards, PhD. is the chief curator and curator of contemporary art at The Mint Museum. She has held curatorial positions at the Norton Simon Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, and the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Women of Land and Smoke: The Photography of Graciela Iturbide and Maya Goded and the touring exhibition W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine, which included the first presentation of Linda Foard Roberts’s Lament series. In addition, Sudul Edwards has exhibited Foard Roberts’s photographs in Wrestling the Angel: A Century of Artists Reckoncing with Religion (2018) at the Bechtler and the solo exhibition Linda Foard Roberts: Responsibility in Representing (2020) at the Mint.
Cheryl Finley holds a PhD. in History of Art and African American Studies from Yale University. She is the author of Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton University Press, 2018) and My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South (Yale University Press, 2018). A specialist in the art market and African diaspora art history, Dr. Finley’s current research examines the global art economy, focusing on the relationship among artists, museums, biennials and migration in the book project Black Market: Inside the Art World. Finley is also the Inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History and Curatorial Studies.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. He is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder who has published numerous books and produced and hosted an array of documentary series and films, including the acclaimed Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the forthcoming Great Migrations: A People on the Move. Gates is a recipient of a number of honorary degrees, including from his alma mater, the University of Cambridge, and most recently, The London School of Economics. He was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998 he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal.
Michelle Lanier is a writer, public historian, educator, and folklorist rooted in the Black South. As a scribe of the soil and a womanist cartographer, she regularly asks the question: “What did the land witness?” Michelle’s geographies guide much of her work, particularly her role as director of a constellation of twenty-seven historic sites and landscapes, including spaces transformed by the lives of enslaved laborers, battlefields of war, the North Carolina State Capitol, the final resting place of Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and the birthplace of Harriet Ann Jacobs, who inspired her conceptualization and directorship of the Harriet Jacobs Project. Michelle is a proudly unionized, adjunct fellow at the Department of African and African American Studies and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She has contributed to numerous films, including her executive production of Mossville: When Great Trees Fall. Michelle has published in Southern Cultures, Oxford American, Bitter Southerner, and has authored a children’s book recognized by the Library of Congress.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV, which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller is an associate editor and columnist for The American Book Review. He was given a 2020 congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism, awarded the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and named a 2023 Grammy Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. Miller’s latest book is the little book of e published by City Point Press. Recently Miller was awarded the Furious Flower Lifetime Achievement Award.