Portrait of US is a living, growing and evolving collection of peoples’ stories and portraits from the many social and economic backgrounds that make up the United States. This work shows what connects us as Americans in a time when our differences are more often highlighted. We have gathered over 250 portraits and stories from places as varied as the Slavic Village Neighborhood in Cleveland, OH, to smaller mountain communities like Green Mountain Falls in the Colorado Rockies.

This project is centered around documenting different communities in the US by using large format film portraits and audio stories. We ask people to share a story about a moment that they look back to often in their lives. This way we get to know the community through the lives of the people who live there. After our conversation, a portrait is made on a large format Kodak Master film camera from the 1940's. This film is processed and printed within the mobile darkroom that we tow along, and we call the Nomadic Photo Ark. Using this medium encourages the sitter to connect with the photographer and offers a slower and more collaborative process of portraiture.

On a larger scale our project is a snapshot of our country today and our way of showing the common threads that connect all these different communities and the people who live in them. It is a showcase of the everyday person and highlights individual stories from today's America. Being inclusive of everyone gives anybody a chance to be heard, seen and leave their mark in history.

All photographs are made on 8x10 black and white film that is hand processed and hand printed in our mobile darkroom known as the Nomadic Photo Ark. We intend to share images enlarged to 20x24 as well as a collection of 8x10 contact prints. Each portrait has accompanying audio that is captured and edited by my partner Adam Scher, we intend to also share this audio in exhibitions. There will also be videos of the still images that have the audio story playing with closed captioning.