In her white shoes, New York-born Nona Faustine walks around her home city. She is visiting once blameless sites – from Prospect Park, to Harlem and Wall Street – which later left legacies of enslavement, horror and resilience.
Faustine has taken more than 40 self-portraits at these sites, currently on show at Brooklyn Museum. Often naked, both vulnerable and powerful, she frames herself against Lower Manhattan’s African Burial Ground or against the slave-owning sites in Brooklyn, in photographs frequently captured by her sister in the early morning, or at weekends when the city is quiet. In her white shoes, the links to colonialism and assimilation are stark in every image.
