Michael Williamson & Dale Maharidge

Homeland
 

October 12 - November 28, 2004

The Homeland Project
“A white mob marches on a mosque in Chicago. A priest stands and tells his stunned parishioners that their intolerance must change. A man is interviewed on why he hates immigrants. In West Virginia, a high schoolgirl writes on her shirt, "When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security." The school board calls it a “treasonous act.” The president signs a $350 billion tax cut. The United States launches “preventive war”. Flag sales jump 150%.

“The change could be statistically charted. But Michael and I had been tracking it emotionally…

In Homeland, the writer/photographer team of Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson argue against the stark division of U.S. history into pre- and post-9/11. The flying flags cover a wound, but not the one we expect: "Prick the anger which on the surface may be pro-war and anti-Arab," Maharidge writes, "and one hears of ruined 401Ks, health problems, lost work . . ." Setting a new standard for journalism that purports to capture the American moment, Homeland is built on news analysis, interviews with hundreds of citizens, thousands of miles of travel, social conscience, and a professional collaboration of twenty-five years.

"For us, the word 'homeland' took on an altogether new meaning after the September 11 attacks. But in reality, the evolution had been underway for three decades as a result of profound changes in the economic and cultural landscape that had left a large number of Americans confused, angry, and fearful. . ."

“I found two distinct Americas, one in the exclusive preserves of California’s Silicon Valley and Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the other in the country’s middle – in the unheralded and wounded towns with names like Celina, Girard and Lusk. The first country was living as if the 1990’s boom would never cease. The second country was languishing, as if locked in a 1930’s Great Depression time warp. “

   “On one trip Michael and I drove from Chicago to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In places like this, the abandoned shells of factories, all broken windows and rust, make this country look like it was bombed in a war. In other places it’s as if an economic neutron bomb hit – with trees and houses intact but lives decimated, gone with the good jobs.”

“In April 2003, during the war in Iraq, Michael and I were on Forbes Avenue in Pittsburgh on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, passing the Delta Upsilon fraternity house. There was construction in front. Spray painted on raw plywood were the words: GOD BLESS AMERICA, SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, I DRIVE AN SUV. As I approached the door, lying against the house was a sign that, I learned from the occupants, had hung during the first days of “shock and awe.” BOMB IRAQ, WE WANT THEIR OIL.

“Since the war started, the stock market went up and the price of oil dropped,” a man inside told me with enthusiasm. I typically heard this kind of approval in the most economically depressed areas, from people who stood to gain exactly nothing for the surge in the markets, just as they had gained little from tax cuts aimed at the rich.”

“Americans are waiting. For what? We have no idea. We wonder what we are becoming and we don’t even understand what we are.”

 
 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer/photographer team Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson have collaborated on four books on the lives of American “Invisibles.” For Journey To Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (1985), the pair traveled the nation by freight train and in an old car, living with and documenting Rust Bowl refugees in search of work. Bruce Springsteen’s album The Ghost of Tom Joad features two songs inspired by the book, “Youngstown” and “New Timer.”

Maharidge and Williamson’s second book, And Their Children After Them, won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. The team returned to the land and families captured in James Agee and Walker Evans’s masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, extending the project of conscience and chronicling the traumatic decline of King Cotton. The Last Great American Hobo (1993) is a biographical snapshot of the last Depression-era hobo in the final years of his life and times.

Homeland (Seven Stories Press, 2004) traces the rise of a dark nationalism in the United States after 9/11, tying the new climate of fear and virulent hatred to hardship and tensions in place before the terrorist attacks.

 

 

Williamson, a staff photographer at the Washington Post, won a second Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his work in Kosovo. His numerous honors include the 1994 Kodak Crystal Eagle Award for Impact in Photojournalism, a lifetime achievement award for documenting homelessness, poverty, and hunger in America given by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA). In 1995, the NPPA chose Williamson as newspaper photographer of the year. His new book is about the Lincoln Highway.

Maharidge is a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He previously taught at Stanford University, and was a 1988 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. His other books include The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism and America’s Future (1996), and The White Buffalo Prophecy (forthcoming).

SEVEN STORIES PRESS

Co-Curated by Michelle Jackson & Terry McCoy

 

The photography series is curated by James Price and Anna Van Lenten

Previous exhibitions at The Half King