Now (Slave Plantation, St. John, Virgin Islands), 09-01

One Book One Northwestern, 2022–23

In the 1990s Chicago photographer Alan Cohen traveled to sites of historical trauma, including a sugar plantation on the island of St. John in the Caribbean. Photographs from this series do not directly represent the pain and suffering associated with historic sites, nor do they capture their broader meaning. The photographs document the site, but at the same time provide little or no information about its history. It is primarily from the titles that we understand it as a place where human exploitation and abuse took place, and where so much money was made off the forced labor of enslaved people.

In focusing on the ground of a site and the patterns in its brick walkways, these photographs question the capacity of photography to document the past. How is human suffering articulated in the site itself—in a brick on a path or in its infrastructure? How do we reconcile the beauty of the place with the horrible events and cruel system it represents? Without evidence of trauma, brutality, and suffering in the images themselves, the photographs are troubling because of what is left out.