What would it mean to shed light on a part of history that remains largely invisible because it was conducted in secret and under cover of night? This was the challenge faced by Colson Whitehead, for example, in his award-winning novel, “The Underground Railroad.”
A clandestine and loosely organized network of activists, safe houses and secret routes, the actual Underground Railroad shepherded as many as 100,000 slaves to freedom in the six decades before the Civil War. Its route would eventually traverse free states from Maine to Iowa, extending as far north as Canada.
Through the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program, a number of associated sites along the route have been identified and preserved. We also know the names of some of the brave black and white “conductors” who guided fugitive slaves, and “station masters” who ran safe houses in barns, churches, homes, caves or dug-out riverbanks. But the visual experiences of this journey have remained relatively obscure.
In Mr. Whitehead’s novel, which tells the story of a teenage slave named Cora, an abiding metaphor allowed him to summon a magical, dreamlike vision of this passage: He imagined the Underground Railroad as an actual train operated by engineers and conductors, transporting fugitives beneath the southern soil to liberation in the North. For the photographer Jeanine Michna-Bales, however, the challenge was more concrete: how to portray the paths and havens that, two centuries ago, had functioned as an itinerary for emancipation.
Ms. Michna-Bales’s quest has led to an evocative book, “Through Darkness to Light: Photographs along the Underground Railroad” (Princeton Architectural Press). While much has been written about the subject, there has been little visual documentation, an absence that makes the book even more consequential, both from the standpoint of history and of our contemporary understanding of slavery in pre-Civil War America. The book also includes a foreword by Andrew J. Young, a civil rights leader, a history of the Railroad by the historian Fergus M. Bordewich, and a recounting of the journeys of three former slaves, including Frederick Douglass, by the scholar Eric R. Jackson.
A continuing exploration of the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race by the professor and curator Maurice Berger.
In her book, Ms. Michna-Bales envisions a single passage north, from Louisiana to Ontario. Her photographs are dark, atmospheric and haunting, depicting the 1,400-mile trek through forests, swamps, safe houses and other refuges along the way. They evoke both a sense of the adventure and peril of this journey, one that would have dire consequences if unsuccessful.
“Growing up in the Midwest, the Underground Railroad was understandably an important part of our school curriculum given that some of the routes ran literally through our backyards,” wrote Ms. Michna-Bales. “I became fascinated with the topic and often imagined what it must have been like to walk thousands of miles for the chance to be free.”
Years later, Ms. Michna-Bales, who is white and among a small number of white artists committed to exploring the issues of race in America, began to imagine “what the journey north to freedom on the Underground Railroad would have looked like through the eyes of one individual.” While conducting research at the Indiana Historical Society library she stumbled on a “gold mine” — a clip file that contained newspaper articles, photocopies of research papers, and other documents relating to the Railroad.
In the early Fall of 2012, while visiting her husband’s family in Tennessee, Ms. Michna-Bales made her first photographs in the series. “I had some prints made after returning home, and one image stood out,” she recalled in the book. “It was a forest at night that evoked such a sense of mystery and foreboding that I knew this was exactly how I wanted to shoot the entire series.”
Her photo essay progresses dramatically: a ramshackle cabin on the Magnolia Plantation in Louisiana glows against the backdrop of the night sky; a slave cemetery in Jefferson County, Miss.; an upward and hopeful glance at a star-filled sky in Colbert County, Ala.; twisted thicket emerging from the forest floor in Tennessee; the first view of a free state, the gently rolling hills along the Ohio River crossing into Indiana; the “Old Slave House,” which belonged to the Rev. Guy Beckley in Lower Town, Mich.; and finally, freedom, represented as verdant trees photographed against a bright but cloudy sky in Sarnia, Ontario.
These dark and brooding photographs also evoke the radical underground’s groundbreaking activism: though devoid of people, they suggest the acts of bravery done in the shadow of an ever-powerful and dangerous white supremacy. “The Underground Railroad has been described as the first civil rights movement in the United States because it blurred racial, gender, religious and socio-economic lines and united people in the common cause of ending the injustice of slavery,” wrote Mr. Young.
There is one striking difference, however, between the two movements: If the modern struggle for civil rights was arguably the most visually documented American political movement of its time, the Underground Railroad was undoubtedly one of the least. To a certain extent, Ms. Michna-Bales’s compelling images help resolve this discrepancy and, in so doing, allow us to better imagine and grasp the Railroad’s physical and human dimension.
“I began to understand along the way that there were so many different people who made up the Underground Railroad, from freedom-seekers themselves to other slaves, free blacks, abolitionists, Quakers, Presbyterians, the wealthy, the poor, female, male,” wrote Ms. Michna-Bales. “My hope is that this project will help illuminate the darkened corners of our shared history and show us that when we work together great things can be accomplished. As Frederick Douglass may have wished, may we all come together through the darkness into the light.”
Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.