MONUMENT AVENUE

In June 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, I traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to photograph the last days of the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue. As someone born and raised in Virginia, I felt an obligation to return to the place I had left behind, to confront personal demons long unaddressed, and to preserve with my camera this moment in history. What I witnessed was the remarkable political and aesthetic transformation of these bugaboos of the Civil War, now defrocked and desecrated.


In the fall, I returned to Richmond to photograph the empty pedestals – the statues had all been removed except for Robert E. Lee, who remained aloft, his fate awaiting a final court decision. The summer protests had subsided, the leaves were turning, and the empty pedestals carried a different message with no personages to mock, no heroes to denigrate, and no clear indication of what the future held here or elsewhere in the country.

FOUR SEASONS TOTAL LANDSCAPING

Donald Trump's 2016 campaign began with a regal glide down an escalator in his eponymously named tower on Fifth Avenue in New York. And his bid for re-election ended, so to speak, with a bizarre Rudy Giuliani press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in northeast Philadelphia. The reason for the venue is still not fully understood.

When I saw images of the location and advacent neighborhood with a sex shop and crematorium, I knew that this was a job for me – to explore this urban wilderness wedged between I-95 and the Amstrak Northeast Corridor mainline.