Representational Possibilities in Landscape Photography: William Earle Williams and Dawoud Bey

Over the course of this essay, the lens-based practices of William Earle Williams and Dawoud Bey become a site of a genre analysis. Both photographers foreground histories of chattel slavery in the United States through the employment of absence in landscape photography. The essay entails a close study of how Williams and Bey position their subjectivity to expand beyond previous conventions in landscape photography and reorient how viewers engage with such work. Through a range of interdisciplinary scholarship, the means of tracing Williams and Bey’s respective expressions highlights the potential of landscape to address sites of historical and cultural relevance.