Jonathan Calm

Jonathan Calm is a contemporary American visual artist and Assistant Professor of Photography at Stanford University.

His photography, video, installation, and performance art analyzes urbanism, automobility, and other socio-cultural themes. His series “Green Book - Journey Through the South” is an exploration and study on how African-American upward mobility is reflected through car ownership.

Calm has produced a body of work that explores the importance and resonance of the Green Book from an at once historical and contemporary perspective. He looks into the ways in which its publication reflected black upward social mobility through car ownership, and traced a trajectory of empowerment fraught with hazard that played a major role in the struggle of the Civil Rights movement and could not be more central to the exposure to violence at the hands of law enforcement faced by young people of color on the road today.