Today @NYTmag published this haunting addition to the #1619project — a photo essay of slave auction sites, of places across the country where humans were bought and sold. Most of them are unmarked. It’s a forced forgetting that we hope to change. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
I first conceived of this idea because it seemed to me that there were few things more symbolic of the erasure of the pervasiveness & brutality of slavery than the fact that humans were sold on the block in Boston, NYC, NJ, at the finest hotel in NOLA and yet we rarely mark it.
I wanted to show ths erasure by shooting the modern landscape, the seeminglingly innocuous spaces, power plants, storefronts, where the transactional horrors of slavery, the selling of humans alongside chairs & cattle, hv faded to the background just like our memories of slavery.
Few seemed better to help us unearth this history than @annebailey63 author of the “Weeping Time,” the seminal book about the largest single slave auction in US history. She worked tirelessly for months to unearth these sites and she wrote the powerful essay here.
This photo essay is the beginning, not the final product. Stay tuned for how you can help us unearth more of these sites.
Special recognition should go to photo editor Jessica Dimson, who embraces this idea from the very beginning and helped usher this through and to @jakesilverstein who has been the greatest champion the #1619project could ever have.
