For eight years Benjamin Rasmussen travelled through forty-three states, meeting more than five hundred people, investigating the impact of the country’s complex history on contemporary society. The Good Citizen gathers what that inquiry produced. Rasmussen’s photographs are combined with essays by Frank H. Wu, and together they seek to provoke thought and conversation around the complicated nature of American identity.

Over 240 pages, the book combines photographic record with written inquiry. Rasmussen’s method is patient and cumulative: he stayed long enough for encounters to become portraits, and for the ordinary textures of American life to carry historical weight. The work builds its argument through accumulation rather than declaration, allowing the question of citizenship to emerge from specific faces, places and circumstances.

GOST Books has published the volume in hardback clothback, with the photographs and Wu’s essays conceived as a single structure. Wu’s contribution is not captioning or commentary appended to pictures but a parallel line of thought, giving the project a discursive range rare in a single-author photobook.

For readers of documentary and portrait photography, The Good Citizen is notable for the scale and duration of its undertaking and for the seriousness with which it treats its questions. It belongs to a strand of American photographic bookmaking that uses the sequence, not the single image, as its unit of meaning, and it earns its place there through restraint and persistence.