In Monument, Carrie Mae Weems photographs the American South as a landscape of unsettled memory. The twelve pictures were made on recent trips through the region and record monuments in two conditions: those still standing and those removed. The pairing is the project’s argument. A monument is usually photographed as though it were permanent civic furniture; Weems treats it instead as something that can be taken down, contested, and remembered differently. What remains and what has been dismantled are held in the same frame of attention, and the photographs register that double state without resolving it.
The book belongs to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, which shapes how the work is encountered. Sixteen pages carry twelve duotone plates, and the small hardcover format brings a subject ordinarily argued at public scale into the hand. That compression matters: rather than surveying the South, the book keeps the project to a defined set of monuments and lets the relation between present and absent structures carry the weight. The duotone printing gives the plates a restrained tonal register suited to the subject’s sobriety.
Weems’s larger practice gives the project its context. Across photography, film, and video she has addressed racism, sexism, politics, and personal identity, and her work has appeared in more than fifty exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Monument extends that engagement into public memory at a moment when the region’s commemorative landscape is being actively renegotiated. The publisher’s characterization of her approach—confronting injustice with eloquence, honesty, and beauty—describes the register here: historical conflict registered through the act of looking.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in how its parts cohere. It is the third title in the series, and it includes an original photograph signed by Weems alongside the printed plates, making the print integral to the edition as issued rather than an afterthought. A tightly bounded book on a contested subject, made by an artist whose work has been widely exhibited, gives this volume a distinct place among her publications.
