thirty-six views of stone mountain (2023)

This video imagines the demolition of Georgia’s Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Carving, an event I suggest commemorating with a one-time screening on the mountain of the film The Birth of a Nation as a response to decades of Confederate-themed laser shows and cartoons projected onto this granite screen.

D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film premiered in nearby Atlanta the week after the modern Ku Klux Klan was born at the summit of Stone Mountain with the midnight burning of a sixteen foot cross on Thanksgiving Eve, 1915. The Birth of a Nation was the first Hollywood blockbuster and was a racist tour de force, celebrating the rise of the Klan as a counter to Emancipation and Reconstruction. Within months, the Klan commissioned the infamous 90 foot tall carving of Civil War heroes as part of a marketing campaign that soon grew their hooded ranks to 4,000,000 members. In the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, 110 Confederate monuments have been removed from public squares, but the Stone Mountain carving remains, by design too massive to remove.

Inspired by the Japanese artist Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji from 1832, I decided to make Thirty-six Views of Stone Mountain. I started at the Stonehenge Mansion, near my own home in Atlanta, where Klansman Samuel Venable sketched out the monument a century ago, flying my drone camera over the treeline to see the mountain looming in the distance. Dividing the 15 miles ahead by Hokusai’s 36 views, I stopped every half a mile to launch the drone camera and photographed the mountain looming ever closer until it filled the frame. Animated into video, the resulting scene echoes Stanley Kubrick’s iconic low helicopter flight that opens The Shining (1980), approaching the mountain landscape from an evolution of angles that simultaneously orients and disorients.

As my camera approaches the Georgia monolith, you hear the soundtrack swelling before it becomes evident that the Confederate carving has been digitally erased. As the camera rotates around the mountain, a projection of The Birth of a Nation comes into view instead of the familiar carving of Civil War generals on horses. In my conception of it, the film will stain the mountain just one time, as a reminder and as an indictment. When the projector goes dark, the mountain will be restored to the blank granite magnificence it knew for 350 million years until a football field-sized billboard for hate was carved into it.

Hokusai, The Inume Pass in Kai Province (1832)