Mixing seemingly deadpan architectural portraiture with poetically frozen moments of daily life, photographer Kris Graves reveals the living history of racism and elitism in the United States. In Privileged Mediocrity, Graves shows us both the brutality and beauty of American life. Each image of a person or a place tells its own complex, moving story and cumulatively captures a longing for the unfulfilled promise of a true democracy. Racism can be seen in infrastructure and planning nationwide, from the human and built environment impacts of redlining and unsustainable public housing, to spaces where homeless communities are able to only temporarily exist before they are dismantled. This book seeks to explore the subtleties of the built realities and the planned experience across racial, class, and gender lines. It explores how racism, capitalism, and power have shaped the country and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life.

KRIS GRAVES (*1982, New York) is a photographer and publisher based in New York and California. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, he photographs the impact of systemic unfairness on the built environment. Graves received his BFA in Visual Arts from S.U.N.Y. Purchase College and has been published and exhibited globally, including MoMA, New York; Getty Institute, L. A.; and the National Portrait Gallery in London.