By Conner Mitchell on August 5, 2021
Richard Frishman set out in March 2018 to document America in a way he hadn’t before.
Frishman, a Pultizer Prize-nominated feature photographer, had recently wrapped a photo series on the more whimsical, “mega-architecture” locations across the country — the ones that make a child’s jaw drop on a family road trip. But in the fall of 2016, Frishman said he lost the sense of nostalgia for America that prompted his series.
“I didn’t want to keep photographing just funny American places,” he said. “I wanted to do something of greater social significance because I felt like we were in a dire position as a nation.”
It took about a year, but Frishman settled on the idea of photographing sites around the United States that still bear the scars of Jim Crow-era laws that followed the end of slavery and perpetuated decades of segregation, violence and inequity against Black people.
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