We must face our past and examine our present. We must look people in the eye, and engage with those with whom we disagree. The only way out is through, and the only way to reconcile our nation is to understand both the forces that are tearing it apart and the people trying to put it back together. – Glenna Gordon
The Aftermath Project is a non-profit organization committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict — the story of what it takes for individuals to learn to live again, to rebuild destroyed lives and homes, to restore civil societies, to address the lingering wounds of war while struggling to create new avenues for peace. The Aftermath Project holds a yearly grant competition open to working photographers worldwide covering the aftermath of conflict. The 2019 winner of the $25,000 Grant is Glenna Gordon, for her project, American Women, which is an extension of her work covering the women of the alt-right movement and the post-Civil War legacy of white supremacy and hate in the U.S. The jurors for this year’s grant were Aftermath founder Sara Terry; photographer, writer and founder of The Candid Frame, Ibarionex Perello; Aline Smithson, photographer and editor of Lenscratch; and Todd J. Tubutis, Associate Director at Sheldon Museum of Art, soon to be Director at the Art Museum of West Virginia University.
With her Aftermath grant, Glenna will be covering the women who live in the same communities as the alt-right women — but who are fighting for social justice, healing and change. As Glenna states, “Men may hold the highest officers and the most power, but from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Amanda the “Den Mother,” of the League of the South, it is women who do the work of change. They raise the next generation. They pave whichever path we as a nation may decide to take…..I hope to create conversations that grapple directly with our nation’s unhealed wounds.”
One of the best things about judging the Aftermath Project grant is reviewing a proposal that surprises me – the aftermath idea is so unexpected, the imagery so strong, that it forces me (nearly 20 years after beginning my own work on aftermath stories) to consider aftermath in a whole new light.
That’s what happened when I read Glenna Gordon’s grant-winning proposal, “American Women.” A project that began as a relentlessly researched and pursued project about the role of women in shaping the extremist views of the far right, had been expanded by Gordon to include the progressive activist women who live in the same area – even the same neighborhoods – as the extremists she had photographed. The idea of a shared geography, a common landscape that birthed two different ways of experiencing what it means to be American – and how to explore that landscape – was a way of looking at the aftermath of the Civil War, and America’s legacy of racism, that I had never even thought of. And to consider that theoretical and literal landscape through the eyes of women was even more thought provoking.
The work you’ll see here is from the first phase of Gordon’s work – portraits and landscapes of women of the far right. In the year ahead, with her grant from the Aftermath Project, she’ll be expanding on that work, and also documenting the progressive women who are fighting for social justice in the very same spaces where women of the far right work to promote a racist ideology.
I can’t wait to see what she sees. – Aftermath Project and Grant Founder, Sara Terry
Glenna Gordon is a documentary photographer and photojournalist. She’s been commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, and many other outlets.
She won a World Press Award in 2015, was a finalist for the Eugene Smith Award in 2017, and others. She is also a lecturer at The New School in New York, where she received the 2017-2018 Faculty Research Fund, and a partner at the publishing collective Red Hook Editions.
Her book DIAGRAM OF THE HEART was released by Red Hook Editions in February 2016 and was a photobook of the year for the New York Times Magazine, POYi, and others. The work was included in “Moving Walls 23: Journeys,” shown at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, New York, and elsewhere.
American Women
“The echoing horror of slavery cuts both ways,” Imani Perry
On June 22, 2017, I flew from New York to Atlanta, grabbed a rental car and headed to a budget motel at the intersection of Highways 85 and 231 in Montgomery, Alabama. The next day, I headed twenty miles north on the 231, and 150 years back in time to a moment before America’s Civil War.
I was headed to the annual convention of the League of the South, a hate group that believes that slavery wasn’t so bad and the South should still try and secede. My goal was to document the women who lead and participate in hateful or racist groups on the far right, in an in-depth, long-term project.
Women provide the far right with a dangerous, and seldom examined, veneer of femininity, domesticity, and normalcy that helps accomplish their toxic agenda.
In Wetumpka, the one-road town where the convention was held, there were Klansmen, tattooed greasers, and burly men in fatigues. There were also well-dressed southern ladies, and men in button-downs and khakis. The mood was angry as speakers like David Duke and Hunter Wallace and others riled up the crowd.
I was forcefully ejected and escorted out by armed heavily armed men before 3 pm. Shaking, I drove to the nearest motel parking lot and hyperventilated until I puked.
On Sept 20, 1028, I retraced my steps from Brooklyn to Atlanta to Montgomery, to the same intersection of Highways 231 and 85, to a budget motel directly across from where I’d stayed a year earlier. This time, I took Highway 85, the Martin Luther King Expressway, ten miles east and toward a radically different vision of America’s future.
This time, I was covering Tabitha Isner for the New York Times Magazine. She was a long-shot progressive Democratic candidate for Congress, facing a ten-year Republican incumbent.
We spent the weekend on the campaign trail, in black churches and community centers. Everywhere we went, people were welcoming and excited to see a candidate who stood for change and wanted to represent them. We were given heaping plates of BBQ and macaroni and cheese. We were embraced, encouraged and acknowledged.
On Sunday morning of my weekend with Isner, I sat next to her in a pew at historic black church in a city rich with history and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, and lowered my head. I struggled to hold back the tears. Going to Montgomery the second time had been an opportunity for synchronicity – I saw the same exact geography through an entirely different perspective.
