States of Fear (2015 - 2016)
Back in early 2016, the presidential campaign was getting heated and the partisan divide had become less a divide and more of a black hole, growing daily. As it grew, other societal barriers, which had always been present, grew with it. As the Trump campaign emboldened the far right, tensions grew around religion, race and sexuality to a place that has left a lot of people very fearful. What was the cause of this scary hyper-partisan direction our country has taken? In my opinion, fear itself, and a lack of empathy. I decided to address this issue in several ways. By traveling the country and having conversations about fear, I felt that I could address my own biases by having deep, open and vulnerable conversations with people from a wide range of backgrounds. Focusing not on political issues, but on the root of those issues, fear. I started in my own back yard, the American South, where my biases are strongest. My hope is that by shifting the conversation, and looking for humanity, I could spark empathy in myself and my viewers and make an effort toward closing the black hole. This has been a difficult project for me, becuase as a semi-introvert, approaching strangers all day is difficult, but that’s the point. If more of us forced ourselves to have conversations with people that are normally outside of our social circles, and overcome the fears that usually keep us from having these interactions, we may have never reached this polarized climate in the first place.
By expanding my travels out to the furthest corners of the country, and interviewing and photographing over a hundred individuals, I am able to find commonalities in the fears, creating connections between people that might expect to have nothing in common. The result of this patchwork of fear is a more complex representation of our population using fear as a unifying factor rather than a dividing one.
All of these stories were gathered leading up to the 2016 election. Since this time, much has been learned about some of the systematic strategies, including Russian hacking that weaponized the fears of Americans with political incentives. The seeds of fear that were planted back in 2015 and 16 have evolved festered and eventually came to a head in 2020 and 2021 in the form of a politicized pandemic, the summer of protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, and finally the capital insurrection on January 6th of 2021. Given all of that, I still see this period leading up to Trump’s first presidency as the most interesting and pivotal.
I tried to continue the work during the Trump years and probably did another 30 or 40 interviews and portraits, but I found that it didn’t work as well. Trump had sewn distrust in all things media, and people were less responsive and open. The divide was so deep that I found that bridging the gap using empathy was too heavy a lift even for myself. I found myself too angry and judgmental to genuinely offer an empathetic ear across the political chasm. As I work toward rebuilding that myself, I think this work is more important than ever. We have to get back to a place where the gap is bridgeable and we can hear each other over the chaos.
“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
