In April 2019, the Swiss photographers Monika Fischer and Mathias Braschler left New York in a van fitted out as a motorhome and a pop-up studio. Over the months that followed they covered some fifteen thousand miles and forty states, stopping to interview, film and photograph Americans of every region, age, race, profession and political persuasion. The portraits gathered in Divided We Stand — farmers alongside service workers, investment bankers, politicians and students — were made in a country whose divisions had become impossible to ignore after the 2016 election, and whose fractures deepened through the pandemic and the unrest of 2020.
The book, published by Hartmann Books in 2020, brings together sixty-six colour images, including eighty-two portraits, each accompanied by the subject’s own words. An essay by Andreas Ross of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and a statement by the photographers frame the sequence, while Victor Balko’s design holds image and testimony in careful balance. Text appears in both English and German. Fischer and Braschler have worked as a duo since 2003, when they began the project About Americans; later series took them to China, to the human face of climate change, and to football. Their method here is not reportage in the conventional sense but a deliberate, slow portraiture, made across a self-assigned journey rather than an assignment.
That method gives the book its particular weight. The pop-up studio removes the distraction of the road and asks each sitter to meet the camera directly, so that the portraits sit together as a single, unresolved conversation rather than a collection of types. The result is less a verdict on a divided nation than an accumulation of individual voices within it.
For readers, the volume is notable for its scale: a hardcover of approximately 160 pages in a large 23 × 30 cm format, with the photographers’ road-trip project documented across both images and first-person statements. It is a considered record of a specific American moment, made by two photographers with an established collaborative practice — a book worth attention for how it was made as much as for what it shows.
