William E. Williams
Exhibition Project:
The Underground Railroad: A Trackless Trail through Chester County,
1998-2000
(black and white photographs)
Chester County, where the Chester Springs Studio is located, was one of the most active areas
on the Underground Railroad, the route by which runaway slaves were secretly ushered to
freedom before the Civil War. This series grew out of Williams' intensive research,
finding and photographing forty sites, nearly all unmarked, involved in that chapter
of American history. Local audiences recognized familiar places -- barns and homes,
the Vickers Tavern, the Wrightsville Bridge, several Quaker Meetinghouses --
presented here for contemplation. The tension between the vividness of the stories
Williams discovered, and the quietude of the current sites, charges these works with an
ambivalent aura, inviting viewers to add their own imaginative "reenactments."
You can participate in site-mapping
the Underground Railroad in Chester County by
William E. Williams makes photographs steeped in history, often picturing sites whose role in
history is in danger of being lost or forgotten. Prior to his research and documentation of
Underground Railroad sites in the Chester County area, Williams undertook extended photographic
series of the Gettysburg National Historic Site, and documenting sites connected to the participation
of African American soldiers in the Civil War. A professor of Fine Arts at Haverford College and a
1997 Pew Fellowship winner, Williams has had solo exhibitions at Smith College and the Butler Institute
of American Art among other venues. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.