May 10, 2021
Sebastian Smee
THE WASHINGTON POST – Art love can be founded on soul-shaking epiphanies or on little “A-ha!” moments. I remember, for instance, learning that many of the gloomy photographs in
Paris by Night, Brassai’s classic vision of 1930s Paris nightlife, were taken during the day.
“A-ha!” I thought. You can do that?!
Well, yes, you can. You’re an artist. You’re playing with chemicals in a darkroom. You can do whatever you like.
Night Coming Tenderly, Black, Dawoud Bey’s haunting 2017 series of nighttime landscape photographs, named for a line in a poem by Langston Hughes, also were taken during the day. Instead of fabricating Paris’ seedy glamour, Bey’s photographs imagine nighttime scenes experienced by fugitive enslaved people on the Underground Railroad.