These are difficult days to be an American, personally, it feels even more discombobulating watching the unending stream of injustice from my new home abroad. A country committed to optimism is once again being confronted with its past, which it refuses or is unable to reconcile. For a new generation, we are witnessing what we watched in black and white during history and civics classes come back in 4K and it seems at x1.5 playback speed, like a bad remake. Where we once saw inconceivable acts of injustice by people we couldn’t believe ever existed, we now see that injustice perpetrated by our college friends, family and coworkers.
Racial and cultural violence are still excused by favorable market fluctuations, and reactions to the injustice are dulled by an unending stream of illogical arguments, poor education and lack of honest understanding. Honest assessment has entirely given way to myth...or marketing. We are confronted each day with the dissonance between the fiction of our history books and realities of what we see and what the data show.
This series is a reflection of a couple of recent trips back “home.” Once to visit family in Oklahoma & Texas and later in New York City for a wedding. It’s a reflection in several ways. First, it’s a reflection of what it looked like. Second a reflection on what it feels like to be American in my X-ennial lens of sarcasm and love of irony confronting the dissonance of our American myths. Lastly, it’s a reflection in the sense that it wasn’t a pre-planned project, but these images reflected back to me something I didn’t fully understand in the moment when I reached for the shutter button, so it was born as a recognition upon looking through my images after returning “home.”
To see more of my imagery and photography journey visit my new site www.aaronjean.com
