Jonathan Calm

Jonathan Calm is a visual artist in the media of photography and video, and an Associate Professor at Stanford University.

Early work focuses on the relationship between technologies of representation and urban architecture, and the powerful role of images in the way architectural constructs shape the lives of individuals and communities. 

More recently, Calm has pointed his critical eye toward the representation of Black (auto)mobility, exposing how the mythical promise of a boundless journey across the land often masks a more compromised reality for African Americans. Through a varied array of media, he creates complex images of the Black American experience on the road as a precarious privilege rather than an inalienable right. 

Calm’s investigation into landscapes of displacement and disappearance are evidenced in his Ghost Ship photographs which imagine the Phantom Ship island in Oregon’s Crater Lake morphing into a sailing vessel, at once a metaphor for migration and memory, as well as a spectral echo of the transatlantic slave ship. In the series Drown Town, embroidered photographs memorialize communities erased by dam construction, their submerged geographies made visible again through the deliberate act of stitching. In Sundown Town, embroidered photographs trace the borders of exclusionary towns once hostile to Black travelers and residents.