Jonathan Moller

Photographer Jonathan Moller (born 1963) began taking images of people in transit while a student in the 1980s, and soon the series expanded from black-and-white candid images in the United States to color photographs across North and South America.

Award-winning Denver-based photographer and human rights activist Jonathan Moller (born 1963) turns away from his usual social documentary work in Central America with a new collection of images recording the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. In lieu of portraits or scenes from protests, Moller documents the past year of the movement through photographs of related graffiti and street art across Denver, Boston, New York and Washington, DC. These murals, placards and all forms of expression left for the public to read are intended to exist past the important messages presented by large vocal demonstrations. They quietly linger on, hopefully for the long run. Moller’s photographs, like the street art, will continue delivering reminders to us all. The selection of COVID-19 response images included at the end of the book acts to contextualize the main body of work in the spirit of the times.

The Past Is Present features photographs of Peru and its history of armed conflict by Jonathan Moller (born 1963), a documentary photographer and human rights activist whose work focuses on the victims of state and terrorist violence.