“What the Earth Knows” is a photo series inspired by the lives and memories of the 49 people, mostly young sex workers and trafficking victims, who were murdered by serial killer Gary Ridgway AKA The Green River Killer between 1982 and 1999 between the cities of Seattle and Tacoma. The aim of this project is to bring people in the sex trade, particularly sex workers and trafficking victims of the PNW, into public consciousness and to challenge viewers to confront difficult conversations around the ways in which mainstream society’s stigmas against people in the sex trade lead to the very violence against them, like in the case of Gary Ridgway. The photographs are almost literally a conjuring so that the viewer is forced to witness the murders in their minds. The victims died alone and in secrecy, wrapped in a stigmatized existence, so the goal with this is to elicit a visceral reaction to the murder of invisible human beings. Gary Ridgway himself was quoted as saying that he killed because “he knew no one would care about dead prostitutes.” The medium is a photograph of each of the places where victims were found murdered or last seen, which is largely along International Boulevard in Sea-Tac, and in the cities of Kent, Des Moines, Seattle, and Federal Way, WA.  

Mission and Purpose of the Work

• Existence is resistance - This is a key principle in anti-racist social justice work, as well as advocacy for and within LGBTQ+ communities, and other marginalized populations like sex workers, which states that among other things, healing is a critical component to reclaiming space once dominated by the oppressor/s. As the Green River killings were mostly of women and girls in the sex trade, many of them minors who were running away from abusive homes, this project brings space and healing to not just those individuals who were murdered by a man (GRK) who specifically said he killed prostitutes “because he knew nobody would care,” but space and healing to sex workers and sex trafficking survivors in Seattle today. Examples of photographers past and present who have engaged in similar aims for their communities include HIV/AIDS activists David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, as well as punk community photographer Nan Goldin and well known portrait photographer Chuck Close. 

• Portraiture as social justice - Just like the Mona Lisa, portraits are a unique form of expression. Though this project is not comprised of traditional portraits per se, it will capture the negative space where people once spent their final moments before being lost due to violence. In this way, the portraiture of this project amplifies social justice consciousness of the viewer, both imagining where someone once was (space) and seeing the place someone no longer is (negative space). This brings the viewer to think about life and death and how institutional and individual violence impact the stories of marginalized people, like sex workers, sex trafficking victims, and women in general. 

• Who gets memorialized? - The fundamental themes of the exhibit as a whole are about creating space for untold stories and silenced narratives, which is exactly what this project directly addresses. The Green River Killer has admitted to killing as many as eighty women between the years 1982 and 1999 after which he was finally found and convicted in 2003. This means for almost twenty years a cis white man got to go around Seattle hunting and murdering young women, many of whom were prostitute runaways under the age of 18.The case has been long criticized by the general public, the media, and the victims’ families themselves for the length of time he was able to be out there. Surely, if Gary Ridgway were killing white, middle class college coeds like Ted Bundy there would have been way more of a priority put to his capture.