Photography was something that Derek Kannemeyer fell into by accident after retirement. Throughout his 35-year career teaching creative writing and French, Kannemeyer indulged a variety of interests, publishing poems and short prose until his retirement in 2016, when he was able to throw himself into larger projects. (Kannemeyer recently published a poetry collection, Mutt Spirituals,and a novel, The Memory Addicts, comes out later this year.) He and his wife would go on walks, and she would stop to take lots of photographs. Soon, Kannemeyer started taking pictures, too.

Kannemeyer began to publish small books of his photography through Blurb (a self-publishing platform) and printing them out for himself and to give to other people. Unsay Their Names was one of these projects. The book is a stunningly photographed narrative of the protests around and eventual dismantling of the Confederate statues in Richmond, Virginia, after George Floyd was killed in the summer of 2020. The book intersperses history and personal essays describing the personal impact of these events.

Kannemeyer spoke to Kirkus via Zoom from his home in Richmond, occasionally interrupted by his cat, Hazel.

“This began [as]a book that I started for myself as a personal document of what I had witnessed,” he says. “As one does, I gave copies to friends. A couple of friends pretty much demanded that I go public with it—one friend asked if he could write an article about it for an NYC arts journal (which he did), and another one spoke to the Black History Museum [and Cultural Center of Virginia], saying, You need to show this (and they did). It became very public despite my original intention [of making it] just for me.”

(The book is usually available on Amazon, although Kannemeyer notes that the online retailer will periodically list Blurb books as out of print on weekends and holidays.)

Racial tension is nothing new to Kannemeyer, who is mixed-race. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, during apartheid, and his family moved to England when he was a child. “I was raised in London as an immigrant,” he says. “I grew up in that first generation of immigrants in England and felt that racial pressure.”

Eventually, Kannemeyer moved to France to study French and English and met his American-born wife there. “[She] managed to tolerate Europe for a couple of years and then wanted to come back home,” he says. “I was 25 when I came to Virginia in 1975.”

In Virginia, Kannemeyer completed his master’s degree and then moved to Richmond so his wife could study painting. “I’ve felt very often a kind of echo between what went on in Richmond for many years and what went on in South Africa under apartheid,” he says.

How Kannemeyer came to begin documenting the graffiti and protests at the monuments in Richmond is another story. Due to Covid, he had not been walking as frequently, but he still had to go to doctors’ appointments near Monument Avenue.

It was right around the time people first began painting the statues; in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, people came to Monument Avenue to demonstrate and protest. Kannemeyer says, “I went to the doctor for some blood work and I drove past Byrd Park at the precise time Christopher Columbus had been pulled from his pedestal and thrown in Fountain Lake. When I went to look at this, people showed up to remove it. I was just there by chance to document the removal of that statue from the lake. It was an exciting thing to observe, and it was a great photographic opportunity.”

The photo on the back cover is a stunningly composed shot of a man shooting a basketball in a graffiti-covered hoop with the words “Black Lives Matter” painted on the backboard. This photo was taken by the Robert E. Lee statue, which had become a gathering space for individuals who would protest and host community talks.

Kannemeyer says, “There were all kinds of events that were staged there. As people moved in, there were community gardens set up there, and there were basketball hoops. It became sort of a people’s park. Eventually they cordoned it off, which they did in January 2021. They put a fence around it and denied access to people. It was kind of a loss because it had become this whole thing. I was sad that the gardeners were shut out.”

When the city made the eventual decision to remove the statues, Kannemeyer was there to document it, moved by the enthusiasm of the community that came out to witness the events. A series of especially dramatic photos captures the removal of the Stonewall Jackson statue in July 2020, as a rainstorm pelted onlookers.

Kennemeyer recalls, “The crowd was enormous, the crowd was enormously supportive, and the rain stopped nobody. Everybody was waiting for that statue to come down.”

Nia Norris is a Chicago journalist who writes about books and culture; her work has appeared in Next City and other publications.