Privileged Mediocrity by Kris Graves (2023), signed

Support for this project was graciously given by The Aftermath Project

* Winner of Society of Typographic Arts award.

Privileged Mediocrity by Kris Graves examines systemic unfairness in the United States. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, Graves photographs the subtleties of societal power and its impact on the built environment of America and the construction of public and private space. Graves explores how racism, capitalism, and power have shaped our country -- and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life.

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"The myth had staying power. For decades it was almost inescapable -- told and retold in novels and history books, in classrooms and from pulpits, and in the new technology of Hollywood movies, such as Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. For many white Americans, it was also a convenient justification of the racial status quo of Jim Crow segregation. The myth was so much a part of everyday experience that most white Americans took it for granted, no matter how relentlessly African Americans challenged it."

Presented in three sections, Privileged Mediocrity is an expansive book that includes photographs from 2013-2022 that look at the historical roots of the United States, using direct, as well as symbolic and conceptual approaches, to composition and sequencing to remind the viewer that context is impossible to avoid, in the same way that history carries forward and scaffolds the systems that comprise our modern culture and society.

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Kris Graves is an artist and publisher based in New York and California. Graves creates artwork that deals with societal problems and aims to use art as a means to inform people about cultural issues. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, Graves photographs the subtleties of societal power and its impact on the built environment. He explores how capitalism and power have shaped countries -- and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life. Graves also works to elevate the representation of people of color in the fine art canon; and to create opportunities for conversation about race, representation, and urban life. He photographs to preserve memory. Graves received his BFA in Visual Arts from S.U.N.Y. Purchase College and has been published and exhibited globally, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Getty Institute, Los Angeles; and National Portrait Gallery in London, England; among others. Permanent collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty Institute, Schomburg Center, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brooklyn Museum; and The Wedge Collection, Toronto; amongst others.

John Edwin Mason teaches African history and the history of photography and co-directs the Holsinger Portrait Project. He has written extensively on early nineteenth-century South Africa history, especially the history of slavery, South African popular culture, including the Cape Town New Year's Carnival and jazz, and the history of photography. He is co-curating the Holsinger Portrait Project's 2022-2023 exhibition, at UVA and the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century portraits of Black Virginians. He is also working on "Gordon Parks and American Democracy," a book about how the Life magazine photo-essays on race and poverty that Parks published during the civil rights era challenged Americans' notions of citizenship and, at the same time, made him one of the era's most significant interpreters of the Black experience. Mason is a documentary photographer with a long-term interest in exploring race and gender in American motor sports. Until recently, he was an active musician, performing with the Charlottesville and University Symphony Orchestra, the Lynchburg (Virginia) Symphony Orchestra, and the New Lyric Theatre, among many other groups.

Diana McClure is a self-taught photographer, writer and cultural producer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is inspired by nature, collective well-being and the liberation of thought. Diana’s essays, reviews, features and profiles have appeared in Art Basel magazine, Photograph magazine, Cultured, Afropunk, Art in America, Art21, Pratt Institute’s Prattfolio, the School of Visual Arts Journal, exhibition catalogs and artist monographs among other outlets. Her visual work has been featured in a variety of venues, including the Philadelphia African American Museum, Edge Zones Miami, Judy Chicago’s Envisioning the Future project, the Andrew Freedman House, and the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture and The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland.

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Co-Published by Monolith Editions and Hatje Cantz
11.5 x 9.4 Horizontal Hardcover with dust jacket
176 pages
Edition of 800 (300 available for sale in USA)

Text by John Edwin Mason, Diana McClure, and Kris Graves
Design by Caleb Cain Marcus | Luminosity Lab

*book photography by The Book Photographer

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OPTION I - Book Only - $100
OPTION II - Book with Print (Breonna Taylor Projection), 11x14” archival pigment print, signed, limited to 25 copies - $250