Photo historian: What I see when I look at America

I live life through a viewfinder. I am a guy who seeks to photograph democracy and the common man, a guy who fell in love with America, first as a history teacher and then as a photographer. I didn't start out in life with the idea that I would ‘photograph democracy,’ but that’s what happened.

I grew up in St. Louis dreaming of places I’d like to see and photograph – the beauty and history of Virginia, the white picket fences of New England and the majesty of Monument Valley in the west.

From my Midwestern roots, a love for our founding fathers, and a passion for capturing the great spirit of our nation, I asked myself, ‘what is the central fiber of the American system?’

The answer for me is democracy. If you can figure out a way to photograph that, in essence, you've captured American civilization.

From my Midwestern roots, a love for our founding fathers, and a passion for capturing the great spirit of our nation, I asked myself, ‘what is the central fiber of the American system?’ The answer for me is democracy. If you can figure out a way to photograph that, in essence, you've captured American civilization.

That is what I have tried to do for the last 30 years, as a visual storyteller. My story in many ways is the American story.

It takes time to cross all 50 states but doing that is how I have been able to put the pieces together.

To create a portrait of an American spirit, you need many different elements – themes of the world we live in, like multiculturalism.

One thing I've attempted to capture are portraits of all of the world's people living in America, because I think that is one of the things shaping today’s America.

To tell part of that story, I might go to downtown Los Angeles to shoot the Korean Festival, to a Latin festival in Miami, or to a Chinese New Year celebration wherever I happen to be. Images from those major events combine into a gigantic puzzle, and then a larger mosaic portrait starts to emerge.

In the early days, I’d drive my RV down open roads. I didn't have a cell phone because they weren't invented. I had paper maps. And I spent about 40 percent of every day being completely, totally lost.

I found wonderful accidental pictures that way, along with many that I obsessed over because the themes were so important – like the autumn leaves in New England. I didn't know you could have a bad autumn, but New England did. It had five bad autumns in a row. So I had to go a sixth time.

Those years reminded me of the fun and serendipity of being a little kid – I grew up right off of Route 66 near the banks of the Mississippi River and we’d take daylong bicycle rides trying to get lost – and how grateful I was to be an adult making a living at what I love. Being an independent photographer is the ultimate bootstrapping endeavor, so my work as a stock photographer for photo agencies such as Shutterstock is critical to me.

This year of course my photographic canvas is in large part dominated by the presidential election, which I have been photographing since the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992.

Perhaps more than anything, U.S. presidential elections weave the world’s most diverse country into a national fabric, even at a time of political polarization such as this.

A presidential campaign is a technicolor expression of the vibrancy of our nation – political theater, across the 50 states. It’s then-Senator Obama driving a bumper car at the Iowa State Fair. It’s Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton inserting themselves into a stranger’s wedding picture. It’s that large group of Republican Party hopefuls lined up at the presidential debate last September at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, with Reagan’s presidential plane as a backdrop.

When we look at the map as a country of red states and blue states, it's all the more important to experience things that bring us together.

When people see my Visions of America multimedia work, they see a mixture of Republicans and Democrats, and the one thing they all appreciate is the beauty of America, the amazing symbolism of all the icons and the memorials.

E pluribus unum – out of many, one. That motto on our national seal is a fitting reminder of why it’s so important to capture the American spirit.