Dawoud Bey’s *Two American Projects* brings together two bodies of work that address African American history through markedly different photographic forms. *The Birmingham Project* uses paired portraits to memorialize the six children killed in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church and the violence that followed. *Night Coming Tenderly, Black*, made in Ohio in 2017, turns instead to large-scale black-and-white landscapes associated with the Underground Railroad.

The book’s central force lies in this passage from the human figure to the obscured terrain. Bey’s portraits confront history through presence, expression, and generational relation; the nocturnal landscapes approach it through limited visibility and the charged silence of place. Presented together here for the first time, the projects resist treating the past as remote. Their juxtaposition asks how photography might picture events whose consequences remain active while acknowledging what cannot be directly recovered.

Edited by Corey Keller and Elisabeth Sherman, the volume situates both series within Bey’s wider practice. Essays by Keller, Sherman, Torkwase Dyson, Steven Nelson, and Imani Perry consider the works through race, history, time, and place, attending both to the particular conditions of each project and to their resonances. The design, developed by Eddie Opara and his team at Pentagram, supports a sustained comparison between portraiture and landscape rather than collapsing them into a single visual language.

Published by Yale University Press in 2020 in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this 128-page hardcover accompanied an exhibition presented at SFMOMA and scheduled for the High Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Its importance for a photography collection rests not on claims of scarcity, but on the concentrated pairing of two historically engaged series: one built around commemoration through portraiture, the other around the imaginative reconstruction of fugitive passage through landscape. Together they offer a precise account of Bey’s use of form to bring American history into the present tense.