LYNCHING IN AMERICA

Over 25 years my worldview had been shaped by a dislocated social biography inspiring a relentless enquiry into a sense of place through the exploration of other people’s lives through photography. My practice is a broad and fervent inquest into the frames of reference that affect our worldview.

The Equal Justice Initiiative Community Remembrance Project is a public acknowledgment of the legacy of lynching in America as an essential tool of healing, recognising that all communities suffer from trauma and damage through a relationship to any systematic violence and dehumanization. In this spirit, communities are being encouraged to address the history and legacy of lynching through the collection of soil from the 1000's of sites of these murders.

77 years ago Austin Callaway, a 16-year-old African-American, was dragged out of a jail cell by a band of masked white men, shot five times in the head and left for dead in isolated woodland outside the town of LaGrange, Georgia.

This photographic project tackles the enormous subject of the history of lynching through the documentation of the collection of soil from one site. In collaboration with the direct descendants of Callaway as well as members of the white community, representatives of law enforcement and a descendant of the family that found Callaway’s body, this project is an allegory for the different legacies of damage that affect all of us.

The sequence of soil images taken at the Equal Justice Initiative offices in Montgomery, AL represent others victim with dates and locations as captions, broadening the exploration from the intimate moment in the woods to a bigger picture of the true extent statistically and geographically. Soil as a divisive right-wing concept of place and identity has been re-appropriated as a basic right of all to feel self-assured in our connection to our homeland.

The soil itself as an image and the descents’ interaction with the soil represents a form of literal, political and emotional reclamation.