Kay Bailey Hutchison Confederate Convention Center

The City of Dallas thinks that since the Confederate War Memorial is in a section of the park that people generally don't visit that maybe they can just let it stay.

However, monuments live in the imagination. The physical monument is just there to place in your thoughts the monument in your imagination. You don't need to be there every day, the impact of a monument isn't proportional to the percentage of time you are in its proximity. In fact monument that require some pilgrimage or trek can be only seen once but have the greatest impact on the imagination since they require a special visit.

The Confederate War Memorial has some special elements which I think will give it a place in the imagination of the nation and the residents of Dallas, and not in a good way. It turns out that being downtown the monument can be photographed against a backdrop of skyscrapers.

The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center is one of those designs of a large amount of glass windows and the Confederate War Memorial reflects very well both during the day and at night off those windows in the most interesting ways. I put some of the pictures on the following web page.

http://templeofdemocracy.com/dallas-convention-reflections.html

I am mailing all copies of all the pictures on the above webpage, except one, to Mayor Rawlings and the City Council. They have all the same little comments that I show associated with the images in the above web page.

As a method of getting your city to rid itself of a Confederate statue I don't think my method of photographing the reflected images off the convention center has much general applicability. This combination of architectural style and close proximity was rather fortuitous.

However, photographing images of the Confederate monument against local landmarks I think could be applied to varying extent in a lot of situations.

The other lesson is to really look at your local Confederate monument and its location. We had been at this monument multiple times, and no one noticed the reflected images until the last anti-monument mini-rally and then only myself. One pointed out people picked up on the symbolic meaning fairly quickly.

So ask yourself do you really see your Confederate monument? Have you looked early in the morning, noon, late afternoon, night. What does it look like in rain or fog? Is it always illuminated at night or never? Does it have ultraviolet fluorescence? Have you tried photographing it with polarized filters?

There must be a lot of ways to get the Confederate monument seen for the thing it is, and get others to really "see" it.