Photographing America's Racist Monuments

In June 2020, amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, Queens-based landscape and architectural photographer, Kris Graves, received a phone call from National Geographic.

The magazine asked if he would travel to Richmond, Virginia to photograph the protests there, and in the surrounding area. Graves accepted the assignment and embarked on a weeks-long road trip across eight states, which later resulted in the publication of his project, American Monuments.

The Getty Research Institute’s LeRonn Brooks, associate curator of modern and contemporary collections, recently spoke with Graves over Zoom to learn about his project and the racist imagery of the American landscape.

For his American Monuments project, Graves re-envisioned the 60-foot-tall statue of Robert E. Lee on Richmond’s Monument Avenue into an art installation to memorialize Black people killed by white violence. Graves partnered with Dustin Klein of VIDEOmeTRY, who projected large-scale portraits onto the monument’s surface, which had been covered with BLM graffiti and imagery. The faces of Michael Brown, Deborah Danner, George Floyd, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Christopher De’Andre Mitchell, and Breonna Taylor shone across the monument’s surface, as Graves took their photos.

For the cover of its January 2021 issue, National Geographic featured Graves’ photograph of the dramatically altered Robert E. Lee monument, specifically the image of George Floyd’s portrait. “I grew up with National Geographic, so this was an awesome moment in my professional career,” Graves told Brooks during their talk.

During his road trip, Graves traveled 4,000 miles across the South, taking photographs of almost 200 confederate monuments within the span of 24 days, gathering compelling images of them being covered, defaced, or removed.

While in the South, Graves said he was surprised to see that most confederate monuments are situated directly outside of courthouses. There are still thousands of confederate monuments there, he explained. He only had time to capture a fraction of the ones that still exist.

Graves said that people would stop to gawk or glare at him; at one point a cop pulled him over for no reason while driving through West Virginia. “After a while, I sort of became numb to these stares,” said Graves. “We had to get the work done.”

In Richmond, Graves photographed a white man tagging “white lives matter” on a monument of the American tennis player, Arthur Ashe. Two women then arrived at the scene to clean the statue. The man returned and there was an altercation. “It was eye-opening to see this happen before my eyes, as it showed the comfort level this man had to do something like that in broad daylight and in an area with heavy police patrol.”

Despite the many racist monuments, Graves said he’s cautiously optimistic about the future. He photographed schools named after confederate soldiers that have since changed their names.

And in September 2021, the Robert E. Lee statue was finally removed, marking a major victory for civil rights activists. “I was shocked they actually did it,” Graves told Brooks. “I thought they would never get the rights to do it, but they finally did it.” Shortly after, a monument honoring the abolition of slavery was erected nearby. The Emancipation and Freedom Monument by artist Thomas Jay Warren consists of two bronze statues: one of a man released from shackles, and another of a woman holding an infant while raising a document with the date January 1, 1863, engraved on it—the date of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

When asked how he felt about confederate monuments being taken down and replaced by monuments that shed light on the Black experience, Graves said, “I just have to say, I’m not a fan of monuments. At this point, there should probably not be so many monuments dedicated to people on the streets. You can almost never get around the problematic nature of putting a man on a pedestal.”

“Of course, some monuments need to exist to fight opposition and racism,” he added, citing a monument of Rosa Parks erected in Montgomery, Alabama in 2019. The statue of Parks stands tall, as she confidently waits for the bus, symbolizing her fight for equality.

Graves is slated to publish a two-book set, titled Truth & Ruin. Privileged Mediocrity & the Deceived Within, which highlights core issues of the American landscape, including racism, gentrification, climate change, and pollution, and Latency, which focuses on his work in the South.

Watch Getty’s recent interview with Kris Graves on YouTube to learn more about his American Monuments project.