From 2007 to 2020, spanning the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, noted photographer Stephen Marc traveled throughout America in search of its people. He went to parades and protests, memorials and celebrations, rallies and rodeos, amusement parks and festivities, historic sites and city streets to see America as it is: multi-colored, multi-cultural, multi-racial, gender rich, and more diverse and urban than ever before in the nation's history. Behind each of the book's 250 compelling images is a patriotic reminder of America's robustness and promise and ongoing struggles with race and socio-economic issues as it seeks to become, as Abraham Lincoln declared in 1862, "a more perfect union."
Stephen Marc's American/True Colors complements other significant photographic surveys of modern America: from Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson to Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Mary Ellen Mark, Eli Reed, Bruce Davidson, Zoe Strauss, Leonard Freed, Vivian Maier, and others. But no photographer has so fully looked at America, from coast to coast, as has Stephen Marc with his unique African-American perspective.
American/True Colors is further enriched by a long interview with the artist by Rebecca A. Senf, Norton Family Curator of Photography at the Center for Creative Photography, and by a Jack Kerouac-like introductory essay by writer/critic Bill Kouwenhoven, who concludes: "Stephen Marc's vision leaves me breathless, and his eyes, as represented by his kaleidoscopic images, are vibrant testimony to the love he feels for our contradictory and self-contradicting land, one that too often seems at war with itself over the very shape of these United States."
Hardcover | 336 pages
