Jeanine Michna-Bales. Michna-Bales spent more than a decade meticulously researching the ways enslaved people escaped north to their freedom. While the unnumbered routes of the Underground Railroad encompassed countless square miles, the path Michna-Bales documented with her camera covers roughly 1,400 miles of actual sites, cities and places that the freedom-seekers passed through in their journey to escape the insidious system of slavery.

The images of landscapes captured in the midst of night are strikingly beautiful as well as haunting. In viewing them one feels as if they were in the same footsteps of those that risked life and limb to seek their freedom. This body of work tells in a contemporary way part of our shared American History. From the cotton plantations just south of Natchitoches, Louisiana all the way north to the Canadian border, this series of photographs can help us imagine what the long road to freedom may have looked like as seen through the eyes of one of those who made this arduous journey.