Rites of Passage in the Atlanta Forest

Abstract Through a combination of photography and text, this essay considers the activist occupation of the Atlanta Forest and the conflict over the city's plan to build a police training center known as Cop City in light of classical anthropological thought on rites of passage and liminal phenomena. It draws from nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork and photography exploring time, memory, and history in the occupied forest between 2021 and 2023. Photography is here used to present, rather than represent, the forest as a liminal phenomenon, where norms are suspended and distinctions between city and nature, past and present, and politics and ecology blur.