Divided #15 – The End
We knew from the beginning that 100 days were a tight schedule for our project. But to our own surprise we even ended up having time for a short detour through New England in our last week. So instead of driving from Pennsylvania directly back to NYC, we went up North and drove along the Southern border of Vermont and New Hampshire to Boston, where we had a shoot with a cheerleader of the New England Patriots.
But not only the cheerleader was a portrait that had been missing, it also took us nearly 15 weeks to find our fisherman. Already in our third week on the road we had been checking small harbor towns in Georgia for a good fisherman. But only in the last harbor we stopped, in the tiny fisher town of Galilee, Rhode Island, we found the kind of character we had been looking for. Charles, a 61 years old deck hand on a fisher boat, who had started to work as a fisherman with 13 and never did anything else in his whole life. A rather surprising moment in the interview with him came, when he confessed that he didn’t particularly like to eat fish, that he thought lobster was disgusting and that his favorite food was chicken.
Our last night on the road we spent in a camping in central Connecticut. We enjoyed a last camp fire, slept for the last time in our tight bed in our Sprinter van. It was a happy and sad moment at the same time. Happy that all had worked out so well, but sad that it was over now. We were tired, very tired, but the realization started to set in that these past 100 days on the road would probably be some of the most unforgettable times that we would ever have as a family – and as artists. It had been an extraordinarily intensive time for all three of us, but the memories we take with us from this trip are truly priceless.
The next day, it was actually day 102, we arrived in New York. Of course we were listening to Sinatra’s “New York, New York” while the skyline of Manhattan came into sight.
Arriving in Brooklyn truly felt like coming home.
But it wasn’t over yet. There were four days left in the Big Apple and we knew we had to use them well. We only had shot one portrait in NYC before our departure. That was certainly not enough, so we shot 4 more portraits on our first 2 days there. On our third day in New York came the real challenge. The unloading of the Sprinter van! So much stuff had accumulated in these past 15 weeks. That van was our home. And now it had to be unpacked, before repacking again for our flight home. We always knew it would be hard work. But it was worse than anticipated. We just had too much stuff. After throwing away and giving away quite a few things, packing up all our camping gear and more for storage in our Brooklyn loft, we still ended up driving out to the airport with 9 big bags (and every single one of them was a bit too heavy…) and an insane amount of hand luggage. To our own surprise we made it to the plane with paying only $170 for excess luggage. Thanks to a really nice check in agent.
So what’s the conclusion after being on the road for 102 days, visiting 40 states, driving over 15’000 miles, shooting 114 portraits and interviewing as many people. On this long journey through this vast country we have met many fascinating people. We have heard stories of happiness and of sorrow, we have encountered people that were down on their luck and others that were sure that they will conquer the world or looked back on fulfilled lives.
The United States of America is still a mesmerizing place. But it is a country that is currently deeply divided. A sheriff we had met in Texas had told us, that California and New York weren’t part of his US, that they were different countries. And he wasn’t completely off with this statement. A person living in LA or in Brooklyn has less in common with a person in rural Texas or Wyoming than a Swiss and an Italian. And while this has probably been the case for a while, the real issue is, that the US has a president right now who doesn’t try to diminish the centrifugal forces in his country, but actively stokes the fire of division for his own short term political gain. And Donald Trump’s game might very well work out for him. While many liberals are convinced that his presidency will be over in 2020 and that it will go down in history as a short lived freak show, the story might well turn out differently. Trump has a very solid base that is backing him no matter what. He once famously claimed that he could shoot a person on 5th Avenue and nobody would care. As outrageous as this statement is, there is some truth to it. We met a lot of conservatives on the road that were well aware of the fact that Trump is an individual with serious character deficits, but they just didn’t care.
But Trump is not the reason for the great American divide. We believe he is more the product of it. While there are people in America with unimaginable wealth, there is also a lot of poverty. And the number of working poor is increasing – people who work full time jobs and still can’t make ends meet. And then there is a changing economy with many traditional jobs being lost to ever more efficient systems and processes. The middle class is shrinking and in a decline. For many people, the American Dream becomes more of a myth than something they can actually achieve. We believe that many crises that plague the country, like the widespread use of drugs, gun violence, racism and the rekindle of a white nationalism, are among other factors, symptoms of a society that is deeply unsettled. It will be interesting to see, how the United States will deal with these challenges.
