Night Coming Tenderly, Black: Untitled #16
- Artist: Dawoud Bey
- Date: 2017, printed 2020
- Medium: Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, mounted on aluminium
- Dimensions: image: 1118 × 1388 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
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About this artwork
This is the photograph “Night Coming Tenderly, Black: Untitled #16” by Dawoud Bey, created in 2017 and printed in 2020 as a gelatin silver print on paper, then mounted on aluminium. The image is a sweeping, black‑toned landscape taken from the outskirts of Hudson and Cleveland, Ohio – key nodes on the historic Underground Railroad. Bey captures the quiet of night, with thickets, fields, Lake Erie’s shoreline and a picket fence hidden beneath a dark sky. No figures appear; instead, the glossy surface reflects the viewer’s own silhouette, inviting us to imagine ourselves moving through that clandestine darkness.
Bey deliberately uses deep blacks, a technique he learned from photographer Roy DeCarava, to distance the work from straightforward documentary and instead evoke the mystery and fear of a fugitive’s night‑time journey. The title echoes Langston Hughes’ 1926 poem “Dream Variations,” where the line “Night coming tenderly/Black like me” frames the work’s meditation on blackness as both protective and profound. By placing the viewer inside the frame, Bey creates a personal, almost empathetic connection to the countless people who once traveled this hidden route toward freedom.
See it in person
Night Coming Tenderly, Black: Untitled #16 is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
