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CANTON (Stars)

Nature - Vermont

Foot and hand prints gathered from a college student on a walk in the woods.

FIELD (Stripes)

Honorary Heather Heyer Way - Charlottesville, Virginia

Tire tracks from cars driving through the part of Fourth Street Southeast in Charlottesville where in 2017 Heather Heyer was struck by a car and killed while peacefully protesting the Unite the Right rally.

CANTON DETAIL

CANTON STORY

This section was created by one of my production + research assistants, Hadleigh Nunes, on the side of a highway in Vermont. She was struck by the beauty of a patch of wildflowers growing along the side of the road and decided to stop the car and get out. The plywood picked up not only Hadleigh’s fingerprints from carrying the plywood with her but also pieces of the flowers and plants from where she was walking. She remarked to me that she was struck with the contrast between the “ugly” road right next to such a patch of beauty and just wanted to take the time to stop and experience the nature.

FIELD DETAIL

FIELD STORY

This section was created on a small side street in Charlottesville, Virginia where Heather Heyer was hit by a car in 2017. She was taking part in a protest against the Unite the Right rally there when a white supremacist drove into the crowd killing her and injuring dozens of others. I went there with my family and some friends who live in the area. We put the plywood down on the street right next the street sign which reads “Honorary Heather Heyer Way” and waited for cars to drive over it. The walls along the street were covered with chalk drawings and messages left in honor of Heather. We were all struck with the fact that there wasn’t more of a memorial to Heather left there and I spent some time looking around thinking that I must have missed it, that there must be something more left to memorialize such a tragic event.

I moved the plywood multiple times, rotating it slightly in order to capture tire tracks at different angles. I’ve seen footage of the event, which is horrifying, at the end of the movie BlacKkKlansman. One of the things that stuck with me about the scene was that the person in the car not only drove into the crowd but also drove back out of the crowd, hitting even more people and causing even more damage. The different angles of tire tracks seemed important to me to capture some of that chaos. We waited on the street for about 10 minutes to get the marks and left. It’s a really small street and a quiet part of the city. 

When we were all driving in to Charlottesville to find the street we passed a courthouse with a bunch of cameras and film crews set up outside and wondered what was happening. On our drive back home we looked it up and found out that the crowd was there for the sentencing of James Alex Fields Jr., the driver of the car at the protest. He was charged with first-degree murder for the killing of Heather Heyer.