Plantation Horror

On the day following the 2024 presidential election, dozens of Black Americans across the United States reported receiving text messages from unknown numbers, directing them—with more or less detail—to report to the “nearest plantation to pick cotton.” By the end of the following week, 32 states nationwide, along with Washington, DC, reported incidents of similar texts, some including slurs that incited feelings in recipients ranging from bewilderment to panic. The FBI later determined that the messages were disseminated from multiple accounts, using VPNs and a free phone service called TextNow. Investigations have yet to determine who sent them.¹

Plantations, as we understand them, declined after Emancipation. But the plantation of the American South has endured in the cultural imagination because of its ability to relentlessly innovate. The Southern plantation—as a place, and as an idea—has become decoupled from its violent past, making it easier to commodify for public consumption. According to a 2018 study, a “plantation edutainment complex” has emerged, wherein former sites of the trafficking, incarceration, and forced labor of Black people have become commercial ventures.² There are as many as 4,000 former plantations throughout the United States that tourists can visit as museums or use as event spaces, bed-and-breakfasts, or vacation rentals. The majority minimize or trivialize the sites’ brutal histories.³

By the start of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than did any other region.⁴ Plantation tourism, as it is often called, originated immediately after the war, when bankrupt Southern elites began opening their former estates to paying visitors. That business model required historical revision to attract a broad audience, and most plantations foregrounded a narrative of genteelism that served a growing antebellum mythology.^{5 6} Despite years of historical revisionism, however, the terror of the plantation system is not forgotten. The mass text messages sent in the wake of Trump’s 2024 election serve as just one example of how that cultural imaginary can be mobilized to horrific effect. 

In her book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Saidiya Hartman describes how the “ordinary terror and habitual violence” that structured social life under slavery made real its “idioms of power.”⁷ The plantation model was one instrument in that brutal system, and it was successful in part because it operationalized social discontinuity, in Hartman’s words, by imbuing everyday life with death and loss.⁸ To counteract this experience, we can look to devices that are similarly adaptable and wide-ranging. Photography, for its immediacy and claims to verisimilitude, can render the horror of the plantation in vivid detail. Photographs, because they are easily reproduced and widely circulated, can therefore create what Hartman calls a “countermemory”—a method for disrupting the kind of “narrative of progress” that the body of American history maintains. By exposing the practical and social mechanisms used to abduct, incarcerate, exploit, and surveil bodies across geographies and periods, certain photo-based artists use strategies of countermemory to illustrate forms of redress in the face of subjugation and racial terror. 

Photographs are uniquely effective at making visible the habitual violence enacted on Black bodies. As early as 1850, Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz commissioned 15 daguerreotypes by photographer Joseph T. Zealy to document seven nude enslaved subjects, including Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia. The Zealy daguerreotypes are the among the earliest photographs of enslaved human beings, and they portray intimate depictions of the Black body as it breaks under the stress of a life lived in chattel bondage.⁹ More than a century and a half later, Connecticut-based probation officer Tamara Lanier learned that she is a descendent of Renty and Delia. She filed a lawsuit in 2019 against Harvard University for the wrongful seizure and possession of the daguerreotypes, but that lawsuit was dismissed based on a legal precedent that photographs are the possession of the photographer.¹⁰ Lanier’s suit claimed that her ancestors, based on the licensing fees of their images, were still “working” for the university. This condition, therefore, served as a continuation of the violence of their enslavement.^{11 12} In May 2025, Harvard agreed to relinquish the original daguerreotypes in what is being called a historic settlement.¹³

Author Katherine McKittrick argues that the whole of the American landscape is a series of violent geographies. She calls for a “different way of knowing” these places shaped by brutal subjugation.¹⁴ In 2019, artist Dawoud Bey produced In This Here Place, which includes a series of large-format, black-and-white photographs depicting sites in Louisiana, along the Mississippi River and of former plantations. The third in a three-part history series, In This Here Place follows the 2017 series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, illustrating real and imagined sites of the Underground Railroad.   

Contrasting his large-scale, richly detailed portraits that often pair everyday people in a single frame or place them side by side in diptychs, Bey turned, in this series, to scenes devoid of figures entirely. By making photographs that exclude the Black body, Bey is able to exempt it from continued “work.” As with the exchange of images of Renty Taylor, the enslaved subjects at the heart of Place cannot consent to their photographic capture. Bey’s portraits of Black communities are rooted in building trust and relationships with the subjects, which both counters and evokes the inability of enslaved people to give consent—to be documented at all, or for their images to be circulated well into the future. This unwillingness to traffic in images of nonconsenting Black subjects is one form of refusal afforded to photography, as outlined by such scholars as Christina Sharpe and Tina Campt, against what they describe as a “regime of seeing”¹⁵ that functions to “refuse blackness itself.”¹⁶

Eschewing human figures also allows Bey to refocus our attention on the infrastructures of surveillance within the plantation complex. Although none of the photographs in Place show the main house, the scenes direct our view toward what would have been the spaces where enslaved Black laborers lived, including 22 extant slave cabins at Evergreen Plantation. Even in these locations, often at the margins of the spaces where Black life could presumably continue undisturbed, we are reminded that these bodies were always tracked. Repeated motifs of darkened windows, silhouetted picket fences, wide tree trunks, and dense vegetation provide cover for surreptitious observation. We, the viewers, are implicated in these positions. Bey never invites us inside the cabins, where we might witness moments of rest and resilience. Instead, we maintain an exterior perspective and must look carefully to see the humanity and interiority among structures intended to deprive people of them.

Collaborators Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick reckon with the ongoing exploitation of Black labor. Since the 1980s, the pair has photographed the lives of individuals incarcerated at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for their ongoing series Slavery, the Prison Industrial Complex. Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. It was founded on the consolidated land of several cotton and sugarcane plantations. Today, it is run as a prison farm, exploiting the labor of 6,300 incarcerated individuals on 18,000 acres situated at the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Three quarters of those incarcerated people at Angola are Black.¹⁷

The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution ostensibly abolished formal methods of slavery in 1865, but it makes exceptions for the punishment of crime. Although this detail has been opposed for more than a century (including in a famous case during the 1990s on behalf of incarcerated workers who sewed merchandise for well-known retailers),¹⁸ this caveat has come under heightened scrutiny in recent years, including failed attempts at the state level to ban forced labor in prisons.¹⁹ Nowhere is this system of exploitation more evident than at Angola, where incarcerated workers make $.02 to $.40 an hour.²⁰ In an article from last year, The Nation reported that men incarcerated at Angola harvest crops such as corn and soybeans for Prison Enterprises, a division of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections that manages the state’s prisons’ output for profit. According to the magazine, Prison Enterprises reported $31 million in sales in 2023; only 4% of that profit went to workers. 

Calhoun and McCormick are all too familiar with the nuances of legal slavery at Angola, and for 35 years they have used photography to document those mechanisms at work. Over decades, and in numerous instances within the series, the photographers emphasize the physical and social barriers inside the prison complex used to isolate the men incarcerated there. In Work Call, Men Behind Barbed Wire Fencing Waiting to Go to Work in the Fields of Angola (2004), multiple, overlapping layers of chain-link fencing and rows of concertina wire dominate the image, interrupting our view of the men standing behind the prison walls and obscuring the finer details of their lives inside. Inside the compound, the artists reveal the structures that further constrain movement. In Two to a Six-By-Eight-Foot Cell at Angola Prison (1980), two men sit atop mattresses on the floor of the cell they share. Knees bent and bodies held at uncomfortable angles, they meet the photographer’s gaze like modern-day Renty Taylors.  

Many of Calhoun and McCormick’s works in Slavery are in black and white—like Bey’s—making Angola’s connection to history explicit. Who’s That Man on That Horse, I Don’t Know his Name, but They all Call Him Boss and Ditch Digging (both 1980) show incarcerated workers in the field, overseen by rifle-bearing prison guards on horseback. The scenes share significant details with archival images of plantations. Tools raised above heads and resting on shoulders, rows upon rows of mounded earth, bare backs glassy with sweat, and the white overseers, ever-present, to supervise and patrol for fugitives all illustrate a common point of reference to the past, but one that impacts contemporary life unevenly. Hartman writes, “In the workings of memory, there is an endless reiteration and enactment of this condition of exile and displacement.”²¹

To confront such uneven geographies, artist Carrie Mae Weems teaches different ways of looking, and therefore knowing, these spaces and their violent pasts, even after years of revisionism. In 2003, two years before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University commissioned Weems to make work in response to the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase. The resulting series, The Louisiana Project, includes 70 photographs connecting the region’s slaveholding past to legacies of contemporary racial and class segregation. The Louisiana Project is primarily concerned with the white slaveholding elite and surrounding communities of free people of color—or gens de couleur—that formed New Orleans society in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the French territories, including their Caribbean islands and Louisiana, the colonial structure established a plaçage (caste) system that legally recognized women whom white slaveholders forced into sexual relationships, and their children, as a separate class. According to Claire Raymond and Jacqueline Taylor, this separate group was excluded from power in white circles and segregated from the enslaved. Weems’ subjects in this series thereby “complicated the racialized landscape” of New Orleans.²²

 As with Bey’s In This Here Place series and Calhoun and McCormick’s works in Slavery, Weems focuses attention on the landscapes and architectures that reinforce strict segregation in Louisiana, proving Hartman’s assertion that the “exercise of power is inseparable from its display.”²³ In A Distant View (2003), Weems appears in the foreground, reclining in a white calico dress as she faces a French colonial manor with two-story columns—a symbol of the slaveholder’s powerful status in Southern society. Overhung by branches in silhouette, with the main house of the plantation in the background, this distanced perspective contrasts with Looking Back, in which Weems stands just outside a structure that suggests a slave cabin on the property. This image presents an intimate view of the structure, and from this position we can see details of whitewashed clapboards. Weems relies on this perspective again when she brings us into the present day. In her work In the Abyss (2003), Weems faces a housing project constructed in the late 1930s, now worn from neglect. The image exposes the infrastructures of the built environment that serve to “organize” hierarchies established centuries earlier.²⁴ 

Weems places herself in multiple subject positions within and beyond the frame. As the photographer, she routinely enters the work to control the narrative and the gaze, explains Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, and makes herself the subject of the image, as well as an “intercessor” who redirects our focus throughout.²⁵ Bey, in a 2019 interview with Weems, labels this role in her work as “witness” to the histories she depicts. Weems agrees, further explaining that she attempts to “create in the work the simultaneous feeling of being in it and of it.”²⁶ In this way, Shaw writes, Weems illustrates the “reflexive nature” of the present in relation to the past.²⁷ Weems appears repeatedly in the series, not only to bear witness to the scenes of the past but also to haunt them in the present. In Bey’s work, Sharpe calls this kind of haunting an “afterimage,” writing that she can still see the “ghosted figures” in the photographs, even if the scenes appear to some observers “altogether emptied of the body.”²⁸

Writing about haunting in American culture, Parul Sehgal explains that ghosts offer a social critique: “the past clamoring for redress.”²⁹ Ghosts, according to Sehgal, testify to the routine violence of the nation’s founding. That manner of haunting is exemplified in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Set during the period after the Civil War, Beloved follows a formerly enslaved family living in a house haunted by the apparition of the eldest child, who, years earlier, was murdered by her mother to save her from a life of bondage. Beloved, as a character, comes to embody not only the unthinkable horror of infanticide but also the collective memory of the Middle Passage and its rupture of Black social life. “If a house burns down, it’s gone,” writes Morrison, “but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.”³⁰ In other words, the power of an image lies in its ability to reshape memory, even in the face of violent rupture.  

A few months after those terrorizing text messages were sent, en masse, the Southern plantation reappeared in the media as news spread of a fire at Nottoway Plantation, one of the largest remaining pre–Civil War properties in the South, where more than 150 enslaved Black laborers were forced to work sugarcane fields. Advertised as “a magnificent 1850s estate,” Nottoway unsurprisingly made no mention of a history that could affect its bottom line as a tourist destination and wedding venue. This symbol of Louisiana’s slaveholding past, now engulfed in flames, became a cause for widespread celebration. Nottoway quickly became a Black Meme: Videos of the burning mansion set to the 2004 R&B song “Burn” were trending on social media, and people flocked to the estate to take selfies with the fiery building behind them.³¹ In Black Meme, Russell defines and discusses this type of visual transmission of Black life online, describing how Blackness itself is a “viral agent.” The Black Meme’s distribution, according to Russell, is a form of self-making in the face of “having one’s physical and social death played back in digital minstrelsy in a never-ending loop.”³² If, according to Dionne Brand, “Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting,”³³ the Black Meme interrupts that recurrence. The Black Meme is a countermemory—an affirmation of life despite the violent attempts to strip Black people of it. 

Frances Cathryn is a writer and curator based in Kingston, New York. Her criticism on topics ranging from the myth of American exceptionalism to marginalized historical landscapes has been featured in such publications as Frieze, Art Papers, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and Social Text journal, among others. In 2025, Frances joined the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University to begin her doctoral research focusing on the ways contemporary American culture shapes a common understanding of the past.