Ways of the Atlanta Forest
Exhibition text:
Ways, not ends, are the subject of this exhibition.
For most of the past two hundred years, “the Atlanta forest” between Key, Bouldercrest, and Constitution Roads in Southeast Atlanta was more field than forest: a slave plantation in the nineteenth century that evolved into a city prison farm throughout the twentieth. As the prison farm gradually closed over several decades, abandoned fields gave way to forest and the history of the land receded from view. That is, until 2021, when the city and its corporate partners announced a plan to build the largest police training center in the country. Over the following two years, people dwelled in the forest in an attempt to block construction of the project, fanning the flames of a long American struggle over slavery, policing, and land.
But ways, not ends, are the subject of this exhibition.
The photographs here observe the landscape itself as a record, witness, and agent of history. They were made over nearly two years of walking the forest’s shifting and proliferating footpaths as the occupation expanded. Rather than tell the story of the Atlanta forest and its protagonists, the exhibition attempts to give the forest presence, inviting contemplation of the relationship between what is seen and unseen, remembered and forgotten, past and present.
Solo exhibitions at:
Institute 193 (Lexington, KY) Jan 17-March 17, 2025
Emory University (Atlanta, GA) Feb 29, 2024-Jan 10, 2025
Awarded the Marjorie Shostak Award for Excellence and Humanity in Ethnography
Find the companion zine Footpaths and Barricades: Afterword to Ways of the Atlanta Forest produced for the Institute 193 exhibition under "Photography."