418 Monuments

2020 - Ongoing

418 Monuments is a project that I started last year to photograph every standing Confederate monument in the United States. The project is a typology of these monuments. It attempts to capture a contemporary moment of transition as many of these monuments are removed, and one narrative of American history is contested. The project is not a memorial to these monuments, nor their history, but is instead an attempt to push against historical amnesia. The images insist on remembering the fact that these monuments stood in public spaces for generations. 

Because the monuments themselves were commonly manufactured, they repeat throughout most of my images. As such, the attention of the photograph is instead pointed toward what the monuments stand in front of courthouses, city halls, historical downtowns, intersections of main streets, county jails, etc. This visibly demonstrates that power structures are aligned with upholding a narrative of white supremacy, and it signals to everyone coming into and passing through these spaces that a history of white supremacy has defined the present moment and is still operable. As a whole, these images showcase an organized and logical plan to hold the history of white supremacy within the landscape and in the social architecture of the United States. The final form of 418 Monuments has yet to be imagined.