About this item
They left in the middle of the night - often carrying little more than the knowledge to follow the North Star. Between 1830 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, an estimated one hundred thousand slaves became passengers on the Underground Railroad, a journey of untold hardship, in search of freedom. In Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad, Jeanine Michna-Bales presents a remarkable series of images following a route from the cotton plantations of central Louisiana, through the cypress swamps of Mississippi and the plains of Indiana, north to the Canadian border - a path of nearly fourteen hundred miles. The culmination of a ten-year research quest, Through Darkness to Light imagines a journey along the Underground Railroad as it might have appeared to any freedom seeker.
About the Author
Jeanine Michna-Bales' work explores the relationships between what has occurred, or is occurring, in a society and how people react to those events. She meticulously researches each topic - considering different viewpoints, causes and effects, and political climates - and often incorporates found or archival text and audio into her projects.
Whether exploring the darkened stations along the Underground Railroad, long-forgotten nuclear fallout shelters, or the invisible epicenters of environmental turmoil, her work seeks out places that are hidden in plain sight, each with its own story begging to be told and lessons waiting to be shared.
Images from her Underground Railroad series have appeared in group shows around the United States, including "Moving Walls 23: Journeys" at Open Society Foundations in New York City and "Southern Exposure: Portraits of a Changing Landscape" at MOCA | Jacksonville. Her work has also been featured in numerous online blogs and publications, including In Sight by The Washington Post, a broadcast special on the Underground Railroad by NBC in Washington D.C., Transition from Harvard University, Geo Historie, Lenscratch, and Wired Raw File. A publication of the Underground Railroad series, Through Darkness to Light, will be released in March 2017 by Princeton Architectural Press and will be part of a traveling exhibition that will tour throughout the U.S. for five years. Michna-Bales was most recently awarded the 2016 Documentarian of The American South Collection Award from the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University. She was given the top Portfolio Review Prize at PhotoNOLA 2015, resulting in a solo show at the New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery during PhotoNOLA 2016. She was also part of Critical Mass Top 50 of 2014, among other awards and honors.
