A decade of mounting tension in a polarized America, from Wall Street
to the rural heartland
A decade ago, Ken Light (born 1951) traveled across the United States
photographing a country that he realized was the most fragile of
organisms. The photographs of the earlier years in this book create the
context for understanding how America lost its way. Light reached all
four corners of the country to document people across race, class and
political lines. We see the heartland and the coastal cities, Wall
Street and rural small towns.
As he continued, seismic changes erupted across America and the country
descended into an age of crisis. He photographed protests and Washington
politicians in Congress and the White House, climate change disasters
and environmental defenders, the rise of the regime of Donald Trump, the
Trump rallies and America's reactions to it all. He comprehensively
probed the fractured social and economic condition, going beyond the
tropes of inequality we all recite by heart to create a visual portrait
of a country mired in calamity, its people deeply splintered, angry and
in pain.
The resulting portrait of the American social landscape is a riveting
historical and visual record of a complicated country in a complicated
time. It is compelling, and one of the earliest photographic accounts of
an age that historians and citizens will be scrutinizing for generations
to come.
