As a child growing up in the New York borough of Queens, in the 1950s, David Edward Smikle dreamed of becoming a musician. He was especially taken with the music of John Coltrane and James Hawthorne Bey. In his 20s, when he decided to change his first name to Dawoud, the Arabic word for David, he also changed his last name to Bey, a nod to his childhood hero. Dawoud Bey would eventually pivot from music to photography, examining chapters from African-American history such as the Underground Railroad and the Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing. His latest project—a photography series and a short film—revisits the Richmond Slave Trail, the path on which 350,000 African men, women, and children were marched from the Manchester docks to the slave auction houses in Shockoe Bottom. “This trail, hundreds of years old, is still visible,” explains Bey. “The ground is still holding its memory and its shape.” —Paulina Prosnitz