By turns wry and poignant, humorous and disturbing, Michael Carlebach’s collection of photographs offers a timely vision of America. The book Some of Us presents people and places across the country caught like reflections in a quickly passed mirror that remind us who we really are and suggest where we might be going.
I’ve spent most of my life photographing across America, often on assignment. But I never developed much fondness for the swirling events that preoccupy the media, and even less for the incendiary characters who elbow their way into our lives whether we like it or not. Although I’ve covered plenty of news events, I prefer to spend my time looking for what has been or soon will be forgotten or overlooked. It is a way of making sense of my country by purposefully ignoring the obvious, looking instead for pictures on the periphery.
Like all photographs, these are taken out of context. In fact, that has always been one of the main attractions of photography for me: the camera’s unique ability to isolate and preserve what is only fleetingly in front of it. Photographs thus confer a kind of instant immortality where none really exists. My pictures may also refute the pundits and politicians who speak with puffed-up authority about “the American people” as if such a group could be so easily defined and is eager to be stereotyped and pigeon-holed.
The ability of photojournalists and reporters to cover hard news in exquisite and horrifying detail no matter where or when it occurs sometimes makes it difficult to see what is going on right in front of us. My photographs insure that these people, places, and moments, most of them not exactly newsworthy, do not disappear without a trace.
Michael Carlebach
Photojournalist, Historian and Teacher, Michael Carlebach is especially interested in illuminating the lives of people outside the glare of contemporary media, and in finding and memorializing extraordinary moments that would otherwise be lost. He lives in Asheville North Carolina.
Michael Carlebach, Some of Us
Self-Published
$45
