My favorite act of creation after many many globe spins, still remains photography, whether it was on film in the old days to digital cameras to now often the mobile phone camera. I have claimed somewhere? nowhere? That photography, like and yet unlike say Blackout Poetry, is creation by deletion.
How? In taking/making a photograph, you are essentially cropping out the entire world except what is in that viewfinder. Well, it will never be a book or a famous talk, but I hang on to it.
I’ve taking to a new form of photo remixing- rathe adding or modifying from someone else’s photo, I am erasing. It’s also my Thing to Appear to Cope With the Surreal Hellscape Right Out of a BAd TV Show Script of 2025. In 2016 I raged through remixes and sarcastic blunderings in the socials as EL Orange Chupacabra which of course did not cause any ripples in the scope of reality.
It’s fun, but for what? Okay, I took one step. And stopped. I still was feeling the urge to do more than scroll and post sarcasm.
So I came up with this.
What my mind was seeing was an erasure of everything I had always accepted to be as understood universally what this statue stood for. The starting image was from some maybe quasi legit “free wall paper” site “Good.fon” (?? somewhere in looking through the site I found the Terms of Service.. written ni Russian).
I gave it the first weak “Sigh let’s try the AI crap” by the Generative Fill features in Photoshop, which sometimes has been useful for extending images. Every effort to replace the statue just put in some garbled version, so I aborted, and went to the old school approach of using the Clone Stamp tool to send the lady packing, very easy since the surrounding sky to source from was readily duplicated.
I started down the track of thinking of adding something. A handpainted wooden sign reading “Gone Wishing” or a “Coming Soon, T**** Hotels”, but that felt, well just snarky. It dawned on me the best approach would be just to erase and let the lack of something say something.
Something happened, because as random and unexpected as it happens, that image I posted to flickr got the tap of being Explored which feels off, since it is not my photograph, but of course, flickr does not require images posted as photos. The thing that just floored me was a comment that said “Mega good cityscape shot.” like they missed the subject of the image was what was not there.
Thus I ended up going on a spree, tagging these in flickr (I occupy all the tags) and in Mastodon as ErasedAmerica. It’s a Tag of My Own (not stopping anyone). And I thus put them in an Erased America Flickr Album which now sits and might stay at an even dozen.
My “rules” or method is first, any image I erase has to be openly licensed or shared. That’s where I start. I also am purely doing these manually in Photoshop and deliberately not doing the AI route. I have no need to, but also, I find it more rewarding to zoom in to the pixel level and do my erasing. Some of the erasures as sloppy and obviously so, this again affirms the flawed humanity at the digital brush. They all are titled “Without ________” to suggest what is being Erased by the Bro Led Administration.
Here are the rest, with a little more commentary.
Without Constitution
The slashing and literal acts of revenge being Executively Ordered seem to my simple mind as outright erasing of key portions of the US Constitution, so I just erased everything after “We The People” from an image at the US Archives, which itself is likely in peril.
Without Colored and Female Fallen Soldiers
Between the efforts to wipe out the existence of non-white and non-male war veterans from the national cemetery, the erasing them from US Defense sites, even the idea of erasing the Navajo Code talkers made me wonder what kind of draft dodging daddy bought me out of war service manic would go after true war heroes? Erasing names from the Vietnam Memorial wall was messy, and I almost stopped, but felt committed to finish. The names left were just done by random choice.
No one should get to erase history. No one.
Yet it has been done.
Without a Plane to Drop an A-Bomb
Perhaps my least favorite example, it does not quite work, but this was an image of the crew of the Enola Gay plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Only in some alternative universe would some foul poorly written homophobic algorithm search archives and identify anything with the name “Gay” on it as being elicit and in need of deletion. I looked at photos of the plane where it sits (for now) in the Smithsonian- I so wanted to use the flickr photo taken by my friend Bryan Alexander but there was not enough background in the image to draw from. So I went to one of the crew leaning on the plane.
But yes, I erased the entire plane, that was named after the mother of pilot Colonel Paul W. Tibbets. The mother. How does the name of a plane cause danger for the defense? How does anyone march along with such orders and do these acts of deletion that are so patently wrong and childish? How? Why?
Without Huddled Masses Yearning to Be Free
Before I thought of erasing the Statue of Liberty, I went to first an idea to rewrite the words of Emma Lazarus’s New Colossus that were written specifically for the base, and especially the second stanza:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
These are the words I always imagined welcoming my immigrant grandparents and great-grandparents, definitely “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”– all rpetty much wiped out in the efforts now to deport, and treat like unwanted products to be shipped out over borders, dumped in prisons. The New New Colossus stands for something totally antithetical to what Emma Lazarus wrote about.
Welcoming is completely erased. In fact, it’s now labeled as being a traitor.
Without a National Museum of African American History and Culture
I’m please with how this one came out, well I loathe what it represents. And worse the premise for which the Executive Order Machinery construes the putting on display culture and history is the “influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology… narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” Perhaps the new museum in its place will celebrate the history and value of salvery? of treating people as property?. No effing way.
From a erasing perspective, there was a lot of the building to erase, but plenty of sky to draw from. Yes, you can find the repetition on the line of trees. I am not a machine. I do like how the ghost of the museum is reflected in the top of the low stone wall. Erased, but not gone.
Without Anything to Ring About
Given the statue was erased first it was a no brainer to send the bell away. It’s not clean, there’s a lot of mess in imperfections in the brick building behind, that is again to make it even more clear that this erasing is but an artifact and a statement. And thinking about an attempt to silence the sound of liberty and how one cannot silence its echoes.
Without History of Internment Camps
Certainly the guy playing his biggest round of “Your Fired” ever is going to wipe out any indication that his country operated real concentration camps. I chose Manzanar because I remember visiting there myself and knowing there would be a majestic background of the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada.This erasure was easy given the surrounding scenery, I left a bit of the monument’s shadow. The space and obvious missing of the shrine works well for me.
Without Public Libraries
Who the BLEEP can even make a case that funding public libraries in all fifty states need to go? Maybe from a guy who is proud of owning only books for display and boasts of not reading. I knew I wanted to erase maybe one of the most iconic libraries (I’ve been there, spent time inside), on prime fifth avenue property in New York City.
Yeah the cloning of the buildings in the back is wonky, like they are all sliding. My elver touch I thought was beheading the lion. But the best part of this that the openly licensed I found in flickr was one taken by the famous Zeldman (since 1995!).
Score.
Without The Supreme Checks of Checks and Balances
Where is the oversight on Executive powers? What was all that school stuff about the balance of power in the US government? It’s gone, there is no review by justice, so the Supreme Court building is erased. It makes for a nice green space, eh?
Without Most of the Pledge Words
Without Most of the Pledge Words flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). Erased and remixed from Pledge of Allegiance plaque flickr photo by daveynin shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
That pledge American school kids mumbled is forever cemented in my brain. We’d say it so many times the words had vanished. But at a minimum, you cannot be issuing Executive Orders that violate the idealistic conceopt of “liberty and justice for all” — that is, as He says, a radical idealogy of his enemies. More words should go to. What is it really pledging and to who/what? The whole “under God” part has always problematic, but now a new deity is asserting himself as thee overlord.
The whole thing will be gone soon.
Without The Capitol Balance of Checks and Balances
Given the erasure of one third of the system of Checks and Balances, the other mechanism designed to keep a mad king from taking over has essentially erased itself. If you know the other buildings, well I am inconsistent as one was erased earlier. Hey, remember me not a perfect machine? If you zoom in, the statute atop the dome is still there, just a lost ignored statue in the park.
That’s Enough. Maybe.
A dozen ErasedAmericas image seems enough. Then its just a gimmick. Or it was from the start. Despite the uneven quality, each day I spent about 45 minutes carefully (or sloppily) cloning bits of the backgrounds at pixel level, was in some ways a respite, a means to not forget but to let simmer in the brain’s background the news of the daze.
It’s all hoisted to sit quietly at https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/albums/72177720324564714/.
I might pick it up again, so if there are ideas of what might be good candidates to erase, send ’em my way. I thought of the Lincoln Memorial as a possible next erase.
Until later, I’m out there erasing the world outside of my camera view. Every day.
Featured Image: delete or enter? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). I love how well this old photo works, and I am shocked at how clean that keyboard is on that old 2009 MacBookPro.
Reminds me of Roy Williams’/ Iain McGilchrist’s “sculpting absences” http://resonancesofknowledge.pbworks.com/w/page/127179632/Abstractions#:~:text=sculpting%20absences