Each summer growing up, the return to Titticut Follies on Narragansett Avenue in Oak Bluffs for a week or two was a balm to artist Austin Bryant and his family. The proprietress, Renee Balter, was like a grandmother figure to him, and the community was a place of solace where his interracial family felt at ease. It was here as a teenager that he became enamored with his first camera, given to him by his mother, an artist. They would leave town and drive to the western side of the Island, where he felt drawn to photographing the fields and open landscapes. He attributes his foundation in and passion for photography to these early trips.

Later, while visiting the Island in 2021 as a new father, he and his wife would take turns away from child care. During those restorative breaks, it was only natural for him to set out toward Aquinnah with his camera and take some deep breaths in the open landscape of West Basin. He recalled the story from 1854 of Randall Burton, an enslaved Black man who stowed away on a ship bound for Maine from Florida and escaped while in port on the Vineyard. In pre-emancipation America, even in Massachusetts, he was subject to the Fugitive Slave Act and hid from his pursuers in the up-Island wild for days. A group of Wampanoag women were the first to discover him and convinced him of their friendship. Among them was Beulah Vanderhoop, who concealed him and secured his passage to New Bedford into the hands of abolitionists and the Underground Railroad toward Canada. The story resonated with Bryant. As a Black man, he had always felt safe on the Vineyard. Still, he could imagine himself hiding in the dunes and swamps before him, and what it would mean to find salvation in empathetic hands. He paused, and took a picture.

At work on his thesis project for an MFA in photography from the University of Hartford in Connecticut, the images he’d taken on the Vineyard suddenly clicked with a Toni Morrison quote: “There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves…. There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby…. And because such a place doesn’t exist…the book had to.” 

In Bryant’s photography, he was embarking on creating a “living memorial,” in his words. He set out to capture and memorialize the mutual support between Black and Indigenous communities, both historical and current, that has widely gone undocumented. 

He photographed landmarks that remain charged with history, and began making portraits of Island people in the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), the Black community, and their intersections. His images speak inherently of lineage, and Bryant’s project naturally began to expand into the archival. With the help of Vineyard Gazette librarian Hilary Wallcox, he read all that was reported on Burton and Vanderhoop at the time of his flight. He worked with research librarian Bow Van Riper at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum archives, and with oral historian Linsey Lee, who eventually took him, with permission, to Vanderhoop’s former home in Aquinnah, now derelict and shrouded in vines, but still standing. 

Looking at the small collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth–century images of the Black and Indigenous community in local archives, he was further struck by the lack of information accompanying them. One glass plate negative of a young Black man, dressed dapper and posing proudly, was labeled simply: “Black.” Inside Bryant’s body of work, with new and archival images, he wanted to evoke this sense of “un-traceability, a sort of longing” akin to nostalgia, but that also speaks of the injustice done to Black and Brown people through time. So, he began a practice of redaction, obscuring some text from the historical articles for a creative revision and retelling. In displaying images, he sequenced them variably, without descriptive captions, letting them become like a constellation, speaking to the non-linear history, and one that is on-going.

In 2025, now a father of two little girls, he added the last images to this collection, titled Where They Still Remain. The Martha’s Vineyard Museum exhibited the work that same year, along with other venues, and Kris Graves Projects is publishing a monograph by the same title, forthcoming in 2026. Martha’s Vineyard Magazine is sharing a selection of these images uncaptioned in a nod to Bryant’s practice of not presenting information with his images to let them speak for themselves of interconnectedness and of history in place, but also of the erasure faced by those portrayed. Still, each image does have history, and depth, so we have offered an index at the end so we might further acknowledge and memorialize the lesser-known histories of this Island, where these stories are still being told, and new ones are being made. 

Index to images:
I: Emerging from a root cellar in Oak Bluffs, 2023. 
II: A young man in a suit, from the Basil Welch collection at Martha’s Vineyard Museum, circa nineteenth- to twentieth-century. The identity of the man is unknown; the archive label reads simply: “Black.” 
III: David Two Arrows Vanderhoop resting against a glacial erratic at his home, 2022. Austin Bryant spent equal time taking his own photographs and poring over archives of Black and Indigenous people on the Island. Some of them, he said, felt connected across centuries.
IV: The driveway leading to Beulah Vanderhoop’s former home in Aquinnah, 2023. In 1854 she gave shelter to the enslaved man Randall Burton. The home is now covered in wisteria vines and has been exposed to the elements.
V: An abandoned cottage in Oak Bluffs, 2022. 
VI: Tiffany Vanderhoop’s daughter at home, 2022.
VII: One of the daughters of Reverend Denniston, who founded the Bradley Memorial Church in Oak Bluffs in 1902. This photo was taken circa early twentieth–century, from the Bradley Memorial Church and Denniston Family Collection in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum archive.
VIII: Redacted article from the Vineyard Gazette, circa nineteenth-century. 
IX: The cliffs of Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark at sunrise, 2022.
X: A beached ship on an unknown shoreline, circa nineteenth- to twentieth-century. From the Basil Welch collection.
XI: NaDaizja Bolling, now councilwoman of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), 2022. 
XII: Early morning arrival on the Steamship Authority, 2022.
XIII: Nyoka Palmer outside of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, 2025.
XIV: Bob Jennings on Narragansett Avenue in Oak Bluffs, 2022. 
XV: Toad Rock in Aquinnah lit by a torch on a winter night, 2022. It is one of many places where Bryant sought a whisper of the past.
XVI: Bust of an Indigenous man’s head on the kitchen counter of Beulah Vanderhoop’s former home in Aquinnah, since abandoned, 2023.
XVII: A tree on Moshup Trail in Aquinnah, 2023.
XVIII: A horse and an unknown rider, circa nineteenth- to twentieth-century. From the Basil Welch collection.
XIX: Redacted article from the Vineyard Gazette, circa nineteenth-century.
XX: Father and son at Waban Park in Oak Bluffs, 2022. Bryant calls it a visual representation of what it means to be Black on the Island: “at ease with space to breathe and to be as we are.”