OUR AMERICA

In the filmmaker and author’s latest photo book, the triumphs and tribulations of the American spirit take the stage.

In his introduction to this remarkable collection of images, Burns shares early memories of his father, a cultural anthropologist, building a darkroom in the basement of their home in Newark, Delaware. According to the author, his father guided him to his life’s calling, perhaps unwittingly. A short time later, following his mother’s death, Burns witnessed his father weeping for the first time while watching a movie. “I understood instantly the power of film and the safe harbor it permitted him to have,” he writes. This book, he notes, “was conceived and created in the spirit that assembling photographic evidence of our collective past might help heal our divisions.” In a narrative that spans the years 1839 to 2019, Burns presents the work of various photographers one by one on a black background with a short description of the year and location the image was taken. The author follows the individual images with relevant notes, providing further detail about each image. Among the captivating photos are a self-portrait by photographer Louis Daguerre; the exposed, bloody back of an enslaved man; the first national monument, Devil’s Tower, which many Native peoples consider a “sacred place”; a plane piloted by the Wright Brothers; a group of Sioux on a reservation in North Dakota; an ominous cloud that formed at the beginning of the Dust Bowl era; a tree-lined back road in the Mississippi Delta; Ernest Hemingway working in his studio.; a soldier locked in an embrace prior to shipping out overseas; a Black man drinking from a Jim Crow–era water fountain; Jacqueline Kennedy receiving the flag following John F. Kennedy’s funeral; Coretta Scott King at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr.; and Rosa Parks at the age of 80.

A moving tribute to America’s rich and complex history.