Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit

As this year marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the complexity of this anniversary is not lost on photography. Photographs throughout these years, both of the mundane and the monumental, become time markers, and expose the different symbols that have come to define America. Running throughout the work are glimpses of one of these symbols, the American flag. Once known to represent a single and unified message, to fly it on a front lawn today carries layered, often conflicting, and misconstrued meanings. At the same time, the rise of other flags marking identity, solidarity, and protest have expanded the visual language of what it means to belong in America.

 

The photographs in this exhibition move between defining moments and everyday life, placing events like the commemoration of Stonewall, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and civil unrest surrounding ICE enforcement alongside quieter, more intimate scenes. Together, these images suggest that history is not separate from daily experience, but embedded within it.

 

Not intended to be a comprehensive survey, it is instead a collection of photographs of different perspectives, experiences, and decades that tell stories of a distinctly American experience. Each photographer bears witness to a life, a moment, an event; some images more powerful than others, but each a document of things that shape our shared humanity.