At first glance, the still photographs by Fabrice Monteiro in his series Marrons, Les esclaves fugitifs (Maroons: The Fugitive Slaves) are the stuff of nightmare. They are hard to look at, and even harder to turn away from. These startling black-and-white photographs depict West African men wearing the kinds of metal devices used to inflict punishment under slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas. These include a heavy set of hooks, used to stop slaves from escaping through thick brush; a set of bells that made silent escape impossible; and heavy metal masks that prevented slaves from eating fruit or sugar cane while laboring in the fields.1
Monteiro, of Belgian and Beninois descent, explains that he produced the work partly in remembrance of his enslaved paternal ancestor, who initially bore the Yoruba name Ayedabo Adogun Odo. Taken as a slave from the Benin region of present-day Nigeria...