The Murder of Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri, 2016
Originally produced in collaboration with Vanity Fair. A Bleak Reality has been collected by Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and the Schomburg Center, to name a few.
"A Bleak Reality documents sites of the murder of unarmed black men at the hands of the police. While each one represents a single life and death, the photographs speak to the greater epidemics of institutionalized racism and violence against the black community, and black men in particular. These social divisions and a startling lack of empathy are compounded by the perpetuation of denigrating and dangerous stereotypes. Graves is able to evoke a person—a life—by the absence of the figure, and creates a powerful, disquieting statement: this is a reality not only measured in numbers or statistics but in individual lives. “ + Samantha Marlow
Image size: 2700 x 2160 (4k)
