Selected works

from In Search of America

In March 2015, I set out on a journey with a simple question:

Are Americans really as divided as we are led to believe?

I thought I might find an answer somewhere along the way.

Instead, I found people.

Over the next six years, I drove more than 350,000 miles across America—through cities and small towns, along forgotten backroads and lonely highways. I went looking for the America that exists beyond the headlines and the arguments.

I sat with strangers in diners, on front porches, in homes, shelters, churches, farms, and places I had never imagined I would find myself. I listened to people whose lives were often very different from my own.

And I discovered that the more I listened, the less interested I became in the things that separated us.

What stayed with me were the people.

Their struggles and their celebrations. Their pride and their uncertainty. Their traditions, their work, their families, their losses, their hopes. The extraordinary variety of lives being lived across a country I thought I already knew.

These galleries are the photographic record of that journey.

They are not intended to explain America.

They are an invitation to look at it.

To slow down.

To be curious.

And, perhaps, to see something of ourselves in the people we might otherwise pass by.

Come with me.