In her White Shoes series (2014-2022), Nona Faustine photographed herself, nude or bare-chested, wearing a pair of white pumps, at sites across New York associated with slavery. Standing on a makeshift auction block on Wall Street, sipping tea in Seneca Village (now Central Park), draping herself across rocks on the Atlantic coast, she captured present-day locations where enslaved people lived, labored, and were buried. In doing so, she called attention to the history that lives on in the geography and the bodies of Black New Yorkers. Though these places have changed over 200 years, the human body hasn’t. Removed of modern-day signifiers, the images transport viewers into the past. Here, Faustine is both subject and author, staging each photograph to directly confront us, whether her gaze meets ours or not.

Chattel slavery was central to the economic and infrastructural foundation of America. Enslaved people worked as carpenters, masons, and blacksmiths, constructing the roads, waterworks, and buildings that grew the nascent nation. Their labor produced and processed goods that generated wealth and clothed and fed American citizens (which they were not). New York followed the national pattern. For 200 years, slavery was legal there, beginning when the first enslaved people were brought to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1626 and ending with complete emancipation in 1827. Enslaved people built the foundations of the colonial city of New York, and its port was a major stop in the transatlantic slave trade. Following abolition, New York-based companies continued to have a financial stake in the institution. Banks accepted enslaved people as collateral for loans, insurance companies issued policies on enslaved people, shipping businesses moved goods and people throughout the triangle trade network, and Northern factories processed raw materials produced using enslaved labor.

The image of a Black woman’s naked body has long been sensationalized in the white imagination. Examples of this can be found in the seventeenth-century European obsession with Saartjie Baartman, also known as the “Hottentot Venus,” or the ongoing battle between Harvard University and Tamara Lanier over the image of Delia Taylor, an enslaved woman from South Carolina captured in Louis Agassiz’s ethnographic daguerreotypes. These women’s likenesses, taken and displayed without their consent, present their naked bodies as anthropological spectacles to be ogled, so remote from the white Western standard as to necessitate display, dissemination, and study.

In They Tagged the Land with Trophies and Institutions from Their Rapes and Conquests, Faustine stands in the portico of the Neoclassical facade of Tweed Courthouse. Construction on the building began in 1861 during the early days of the Civil War. The land underneath was used as an African burial ground between 1686 and 1755. A 2000 archaeological survey of the site confirmed that human remains still rest below the courthouse. In the photo, Faustine grasps one of the immense columns in both hands, pushing against it with her body, as if to topple the building and free the souls of those buried beneath. On the Cold Steps of Justice Waiting for Vengeance shows Faustine in three-quarter view standing between the columns at the top of the stairs and gazing pensively out onto the street. A shackle dangles from one wrist, implying that she has broken free, and a discarded robe lays on the ground behind her. As the author of her own image, Faustine reclaimed her body as a source of power rather than one of shame.