Mark Peterson

An unflinching and courageous expos of white supremacy's ascent and ubiquity in America today

In White Noise American photographer Mark Peterson (born 1955) examines the rhetoric of the White House on immigration and Muslim bans, and how this echoes and intersects with nationalism, Western chauvinism, white supremacy, neo-Nazis and all those calling for an ethnostate in America. Peterson, whose photos have been featured in the New York Times, Fortune, Time Magazine and elsewhere, began his project as a means to understand the divisive mood of the country following the 2016 presidential election. His often confronting subjects include anti-Muslim rallies in New York; families on Confederate Memorial Day in the South; white nationalists protesting in Charlottesville, preceding the murder of Heather Heyer; leaders of the Ku Klux Klan in their homes; burning swastikas.

The result is a vital and unsettling portrait of the normalization of this reality in the United States; in the words of Claudia Rankine, who contributes an essay: "What our government won't acknowledge Mark Peterson has. His images focus on the terror that has taken advantage of our refusal to look it squarely in its face and acknowledge it as homegrown and thriving."