America at 250: The Story Is Still Being Written

Jul 4
2 min read

There are places in this country where you can feel the story before anyone says a word.

A line of American flags moving against the sky. The Washington Monument standing across the water. An eagle carved into stone, weathered by time but still watching. Liberty facing the harbor with her torch lifted above the city.

Through a camera, these places are more than landmarks.

They are reminders.

As the United States marked 250 years of independence, I kept coming back to that idea while looking through these photographs. Two and a half centuries is difficult to fully comprehend — generations of people living through war, expansion, division, progress, loss, sacrifice and change.

America's story has never been clean or simple.

It began in rebellion and has been tested repeatedly ever since. There have been moments when the country lived up to its highest ideals and others when it fell painfully short of them.

But the promise remained.

The belief that liberty can expand. That wrongs can be confronted. That ordinary people can leave something better behind for the generation that follows them.

That is what these photographs represent to me.

More Than Symbols

It is easy to photograph the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty or an American flag and simply call the image patriotic.

But standing in front of these places feels different.

You begin thinking about the millions of individual stories behind the symbols — soldiers who never came home, families who crossed oceans looking for a new beginning, people who fought to make the words written at America's founding apply to them too, and generations who served their communities without ever becoming part of a history book.

The monuments remain because the people and stories behind them mattered.

That is what I try to photograph.

Not simply the object in front of the lens, but what it represents.