Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young: Untitled (Structures)

A long-form collaborative exploration of images and their enduring traces on the American landscape

In 2012, Leslie Hewitt (born 1977) and Bradford Young (born 1977) produced Untitled (Structures), a series of silent, nonlinear film vignettes that grew out of an invitation from the Menil Collection, Houston, to consider the museum’s civil rights-era photograph collection. The invitation, which inspired years of research into the aftereffects of the Great Migration, the civil rights movement and the ongoing struggle for human rights, prompted Hewitt and Young to shoot new work in Chicago, Memphis and Arkansas in an array of important sites, found and not found in the museum’s photographs. Exposing the tensions between still photography and moving images, Hewitt and Young’s project interrogates the ways in which history is embedded in contemporary topographic, corporeal and psychological landscapes. Taking the film as its point of departure, this publication furthers the artists’ inquiries into the project’s poetic and political themes, including psychogeography, anti-monumentalism and the intersections of image, memory and architecture.