Richard Guzman, “Torrance Art Museum opens… exhibits challenging perceptions.”
Daily Breeze, 30 Mar. 2015, Torrance.
Excerpt:
“One of the artists challenging history with photography is Silver Lake-based Ken Gonzales-Day.
Gonzales-Day is displaying a number of images from his “Erased Lynching Series,” which is made up of digitally manipulated historical photographs of lynchings. He has digitally removed the lynching victim while leaving the perpetrators intact.
The series was inspired by his research and subsequent book called “Lynching in the West: 1850-1935.”
Through the course of his research, he said he found that the number of lynchings in the West had been grossly undercounted by historians.
“The idea was to create a visual metaphor that talked about the erasure of these communities from the history of lynching,” he said of his photography series.
“We would normally expect photography to document events. The idea is rather than try to take a documentary approach to it, this work resists or rejects that model and says photography can function in a different kind of way that doesn’t have to just document but can also provoke…”
Source: Daily Breeze