Monument Avenue

If Rich­mond VA rep­re­sented the his­toric heart of the Con­fed­er­a­cy, then Mon­u­ment Avenue was meant to memo­ri­al­ize its soul. Almost from the moment they were erect­ed, how­ev­er, the mon­u­ments to Con­fed­er­ate heroes attract­ed con­tro­ver­sy and protest. This reached a cli­max in the sum­mer of 2020 when Black Lives Mat­ter pro­test­ers, out­raged by the death of George Floyd, con­verged on the avenue to vent their fury. On July 10th, Jef­fer­son Davis’s stat­ue was dragged from its pedestal. Two days lat­er, Bri­an Rose packed up his cam­eras in New York and drove back to his home state to doc­u­ment the last days of the grand boule­vard of the Lost Cause. En route, he reflect­ed on his own his­to­ry and the roles played by his fore­bears in the Ante­bel­lum South.

Bri­an Rose stud­ied at Coop­er Union with pho­tog­ra­phers Joel Meyerowitz and Lar­ry Fink. He has pub­lished numer­ous books that explore urban themes, includ­ing The Lost Bor­der, The Land­scape of the Iron Cur­tain (2004) and Atlantic City (2019). His pho­tographs are in the col­lec­tions of the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art and the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art.