Monument Avenue

A compelling visual record of the final days of the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue, Richmond VA, by photographer Brian Rose.

If Richmond VA represented the historic heart of the Confederacy, then Monument Avenue was meant to memorialize its soul. The avenue was conceived in the 1870s, when the city elected to build a memorial to General Robert E Lee. It was not until 1890, however, that the massive monument was unveiled. Over the succeeding decades, Lee was joined by statues commemorating other leading Confederate military and political figures - JEB Stuart, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Matthew Fontaine Maury.

Almost from the moment they were erected, the Confederate monuments, as symbols of white supremacy, were the focus of controversy and protest. The climax came 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 was dragged from his 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.This new edition of a classic book captures a pivotal moment in modern American history.

Brian Rose studied at Cooper Union with photographers Joel Meyerowitz and Larry Fink. His documentation of lower Manhattan over a 20-year period resulted in three books - Time and Space on the Lower East Side, Metamorphosis, and WTC, a chronicle of the Twin Towers and the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. His study of Berlin after the fall of the Wall led to The Lost Border, The Landscape of the Iron Curtain; and his documentation of Donald J Trump’s failed casino enterprises in Atlantic City resulted in Atlantic City (Circa Press, 2019). His photographs are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.