Rarity 10.4/100 · Collector 0/100 · Deal 48.52/100 · Listings: 6 · Avg price: $16.27 · Min price: $9.74

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In 2010, the number of Americans living below the poverty line reached its highest level since the US Census Bureau began keeping the relevant data in 1959. The following year, Kira Pollack, then Director of Photography at Time, commissioned Joakim Eskildsen to address a crisis affecting nearly 46.2 million people. American Realities grew from that assignment, replacing the scale of a national statistic with encounters involving particular people and places.

Over seven months, Eskildsen travelled with journalist Natasha del Toro through New York, California, Louisiana, South Dakota and Georgia, selecting locations on the basis of census data identifying high poverty rates. His photographs portray people struggling to meet ordinary expenses, living with unemployment or the loss of a home, and sometimes enduring unhealthy conditions. Del Toro’s accompanying texts add a journalistic dimension to the project, grounding the photographs in the circumstances of those represented rather than allowing poverty to remain an anonymous category.

The title sets the work against the persistent rhetoric of the American Dream. Yet the book’s force lies less in a general declaration than in its attention to lives often kept outside the country’s dominant self-image. Portraiture and social documentation operate together: individual presence is central, while the geographical range connects distinct communities to a broader economic condition. The project thus records both the intimacy of hardship and the structural scale indicated by the census figures that initiated it.

Published by Steidl in 2015, American Realities deserves consideration within collections focused on documentary photography, American social history and collaborations between photographers and writers. Its significance rests on the conjunction of a precisely defined historical moment, research-led fieldwork across five states, and sustained attention to people obscured by national mythology. For the collector, it offers a concentrated example of how an editorial commission can develop into a book-length account in which statistical evidence, photographs and reported text address the same social reality from different positions.