Latency #6 (Williams Carter Wickham) by Kris Graves

Confederate leader Williams Carter Wickham plinth at Monroe Park., Richmond, Virginia, 2020

In the summer of 2020 a collective uprising rooted in local civic engagements, ricocheted around the world in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. It relied on one of the central pillars of Democracy—peaceful protest. Although grounded in the particular, the embodied actions of the multitudes illuminated larger universal questions of basic human rights and dignity in the 21st century. The echo of empathy, anger and pain born from the eight minutes and 46 seconds of viral video that captured Floyd’s passing, resonated not only in the United States, but in ongoing struggles across the globe, from Hong Kong to Belarus and beyond. While the breadth of these issues touches every corner of the earth, it is the murder of individual Black lives intertwined in the brutal history of the United States that is at the center of Kris Graves’ photographic project Latency.

The project sheds light on the literal dismembering, removal and reimagining of monuments, as well as an ongoing psychic cleansing—or exorcism—of a historical narrative rooted in an unscrupulous twisted American fantasy known as the Lost Cause. A story where the protagonist is the benevolent white slaveholder, abolitionists play the antagonist, the supporting cast is full of happy Black slaves with servile natures, Indigenous communities are invisible, and misunderstood Ku Klux Klan members really exist to help widows. The plot revolves around the Confederacy’s loss of the Civil War, a new antagonist—free Black people—and a longing to reclaim the genteel days and status quo of yesteryear through a series of race-based schemes: segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as Jim Crow; the systematic denial of various services, goods and investments known as redlining; specific populations of people locked up in federal and state prisons, and local jails, known as mass incarceration; the erasure of the origins of generational white wealth born of free Black labor; and, in regard to Graves’ photos, the application of taxpayer dollars to fund Confederate historical sites, their maintenance, and thus their narrative.

The demise of this storyline is ritualized most vividly in a suite of photographs taken by Graves at Lee Circle in Richmond, Virginia in July 2020. The images shot at night capture a series of projections superimposed onto a 60-foot tall statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, part of Richmond’s iconic Monument Avenue. Run by an artist named Videometry, the projections feature the faces of recent Black victims of fatal white violence: Eric Garner, Christopher DeAndre Mitchell, Nia Wilson, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd to name a few.

While we see the memorialization of some of the latest deaths in a long history of loss in Black communities, it is also the death of the confederate monument that is on view: an iconic symbol of American heroism held up on the armature of white supremacy, as it falls from grace, eloquently disheveled by the hands of everyday citizens. Graves’ photographs frame the deconstruction and reconstruction of an American narrative, a defacement and replacement of collective memory. A colorful bouquet of graffiti embellishes the base of the statue, the collective voice of individual remembrance, protest and disobedience. The agency of the written word merging with the photographic portraits and an illumined “BLM” (Black Lives Matter) astride General Lee’s horse, sit beneath the all-knowing embrace of cumulus clouds in a night sky at twilight. Meanwhile, Lee’s figure fades to black. The space reverberates with a communal celebration and mourning that lingers in the air across time. The spirit of ancestors and witnesses to the present turn of history converge in Graves’ photographs, offering an archive of remembrance, written in light and the graffitied surfaces of stone, texturized by descent.

In a sense, the shadows of Black life captured in Graves’ Latency frame a 21st century rejection of a narrative taken for granted for far too long. No longer allowed to fester as it lies stealth in both the internal and external landscapes and architecture of what it means to be an American, it is exposed, naked in contested spaces, an open-ended plot line yet to be determined, with the world as witness. Going forward, what version of history will we protect? How will it be told? Who will pay to keep it alive? Will we be honest? Can white Americans self-reflect? Can they share power? With the potential for human rights abuses ever-present in the human experience, Graves’ Latency offers a record of a potential moment, a decisive moment, in the dawn of a new paradigm.

In a pair of before and after photographs of another Monument Avenue memorial, one to the revered oceanographer and Confederate States Navy officer Matthew Fontaine Maury, a shift in the balance of power in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, is palpable. The decisive removal of the piece by the city’s Mayor Levar Stoney, a Black man, is emblematic of the importance of combating voter suppression in an effort to diversify state legislatures and political offices. Citing public safety and health risks due to protests and the coronavirus as cause for removal, national issues of safety, health and equity reverberated in his response.

The diptych shows two nearly identical photographs in terms of framing, scale and the messaging of graffiti on the façade on the monument’s base. However, what distinguishes the two, beyond the removal of figuration in the second image, is the landscape that fills each frame. The former contains a flat grey sky and monotonous green foliage, while the latter a crisp cloudless blue, tonal greens in grass and trees, and blooming pink bushes, signaling Graves’ final position on the matter—joy.

In contrast, Graves offers a different view of the end of the memorialization of the Confederate States of America in an image taken in Tuskegee, Alabama. Elegantly draped in blue tarp with a minimalist wrapping of thin white rope in three loops, a veiled monument sits docile and silenced like a piece of conceptual art. Framed by a drab green landscape, a pale sky and an unremarkable piece of historic architecture, it asks the viewer to contemplate it’s meaning—to bear witness to civic acts, old and new, from a new perspective, that of the 21st century.

-Diana McClure