Bey’s practice over the past decade has led him to interrogate memory and space across portraits and landscapes. In what is perhaps Bey’s most emotion-laden series, “The Birmingham Project” (2012), he photographed the community of Birmingham, Alabama, nearly 50 years after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. The portraits pair adolescents with elders to make palpable the memory of the four girls whose lives were lost in that bombing and the time that has passed since. “The Birmingham Project is the first project in which I directly took on the challenge of how to visualize the past in the contemporary moment,” Bey explained, “to create a kind of liminal space somewhere between past and present.”
This artistic shift to interrogating, in his words, the “narrative of place, and the histories embedded in place” through landscape imagery, is one that Bey described as akin to learning a different language. Yet it’s a style that he is thoroughly comfortable with now.
In the 2017 series “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” Bey traces the escape routes of enslaved people following paths along the Underground Railroad. The pitch-dark color palette makes the images difficult to see, yet offers a visceral sense of what flight might have looked like for those escaping Southern plantations at night.