Keris Salmon didn’t need to photograph whips or leg irons to illustrate the misery of American slavery.
Keris Salmon. Cargo, 2016. Digital print with letterpress. (STEWART CLEMENTS/Lent by the artist)
She chose the image of a hand-carved staircase in a plantation house, an architectural detail the enslaved made for their owners but would not have in their shacks. And the image of a soaring bird, a daily reminder of freedom that enslaved men and women must have seen while they labored in Southern fields.
The idea came to the journalist-turned-artist six years ago during a brief tour of the Wessyngton plantation in Tennessee.
“It was the cemetery,” Salmon said. "The imposing ironwork of the gate. It was the drive leading up to the house. It was a life-changing experience, and I knew I had to express it visually.”
Her work looking at the social and physical structure of slavery through photography is featured in the “We Have Made These Lands What They Are: The Architecture of Slavery” exhibition that opens Friday at the Chrysler Museum of Art.
It complements the Chrysler’s signature exhibition, which examines the well-known architectural designs of the nation’s third president and the role of the enslaved in building them: “Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles, and the Conflict of Ideals.”
Salmon’s project includes 18 prints taken during three years of excursions to plantations and slave cabins throughout the South, including Virginia’s Belle Grove in the Shenandoah Valley. Also included are six from a series based solely on the Tennessee plantation and a debut of 18 cyanotypes — blue-toned prints — that show architectural details through the cyanotype process that was used in the earliest days of photography.
The exhibition runs through March 1.
Keris Salmon, Sarah, 2014. Digital print with letterpress. (Lent by Arnika Dawkins Gallery)
Salmon worked for more than 20 years as an award-winning broadcast journalist who loved tackling meaty issues of social justice. She left the news business in 2007, delved into her love of art and started taking textile courses.
In 2013, Salmon, who is African American, and her white, soon-to-be-husband, Frank Williams, went on a trip to Tennessee so he could show her the former plantation he’d visited during the years.
The property had been in his family since 1790, and the subsequent generations had owned at least 447 slaves by the end of the Civil War, Salmon said. The family sold the property in the 1980s.
Salmon said the tour lasted less than two hours, yet it defined her as an artist.
“I’d never been to a plantation before — I’m from New York City!” Salmon said during a phone interview from her New York home studio.
The reality that her life with Williams “would have been quite different” 150 or 200 years ago was jarring, she said.
Her artistic eye looked for pedestrian images on the sites that those in bondage would have seen or created. Rows of church pews. A tree draped in Spanish moss. A statue in a garden. The geometric pattern of a fence.
“The thing about the work is that it’s depicting something horrible in a beautiful way,” she said.
“It doesn’t have to involve leg irons, manacles or body welts. Instead, it’s showing you something poetic. It draws the viewer in instead of repelling.”
Her journalistic mind looked for the words to put the images into context. Salmon read through books about slavery, diary entries by owners, accounting logs and slave auction records for material to include with the photos.
For example, the image of the handrail on a sweeping staircase, taken at Belle Grove, includes a list of building materials the laborers would have used. In the photograph of a heron about to take flight, Salmon uses the words from a written plea a South Carolina plantation owner made as he was trying to track two runaway slaves. The photographs are printed on paper made from cotton rag to symbolize the king crop of the Southern plantations. For the text, she used a typeface to resemble the lettering used in posters advertising slave auctions and runaways.
The title of the show, “We Have Made These Lands What They Are,” is taken from the book “Back of the Big House,” written by George Washington University professor John Michael Vlach.
The book includes a story of a group of whites who stopped a group of newly freed African Americans who were walking back to the North Carolina plantation where they had worked. When the whites asked them why they were going back, the former slaves remarked that they had made those “lands what they are” and it was their home.
“These are real lives, real humans, real thoughts, real feelings,” Salmon said. “These are real things that they built.
