The images of the women in these prints are taken form the classic silent film Birth of A Nation produced by D.W. Griffith in 1915. Birth of a Nation is widely noted for its cinematic inventiveness as well as its blatantly racist portrait of the South during Reconstruction. Though much attention in particular has been paid to Griffith’s romantic portrayal of the Klan, less has been said about the white female characters whose “honor” figures so highly in the film’s violent climax. Lynching in the South was often justified as a defense of the purity of white womanhood and the female characters in Birth of A Nation are indeed long suffering and pure (one of them throws herself off a cliff rather than succumb to the advances of a black man) as well as simplistic. While these characters are completely at odds with contemporary feminist sensibilities, they are also strangely beguiling – visually arresting and haunting, which is largely a testament to Griffith’s skill as a filmmaker.

Because much of the South remained largely rural for near to a century after the end of the Civil War, lynchings were often carried out in wooded areas especially as the practice became less and less acceptable socially and legally (it should be noted that lynchings occurred in other areas of the country as well but the majority happened in erstwhile Confederate states). The thick green of the forest provided a measure of privacy and today the tangled woods in rural areas of the South can be unsettling when thought of as the cover for brutality. In these prints, photographs of trees, all taken in central Alabama, have been digitally altered, then layered with the stills from Birth of a Nation in an attempt to connect Griffith’s filmic images of feminine beauty to their much more insidious employment as the impetus for violence.