Biography:
Peter Nohrnberg is a scholar of literary modernism, cultural critic, poet, and photographer. He has been taking photographs since he was an adolescent, and is currently a member of the Boston Photographic Resource Center, where he has...
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Topics
Architecture, Black and White, Charlottesville, 1970s, Virginia, Downtown Mall, Essays, Photography, Photojournalism, Street
Long before the mayhem of August 12, 2017, when white supremacist protesters and counter-protesters gathered in the downtown of Charlottesville, Virginia battled over not just the legacy of Confederate statuary but the degree to which racism would be openly tolerated in America, the downtown was a place of harmony, culture, and commerce. Taken on film cameras between the years of 1985 and 1995, these photographs capture the laid-back atmosphere of Charlottesville's pedestrian Downtown Mall, which was created by the visionary landscape architect Lawrence Halprin in 1975. The pictures reveal the spatial openness of the Downtown Mall, both a cause and effect of the values of tolerance and of cosmopolitanism that have increasingly come to define the small southern college town where I grew up.
