Cover of a book titled 'We the People: The United States at 250' by Steven G. Smith, featuring a group of people marching outdoors under a cloudy sky, with a large American flag on a pole and a man wearing sunglasses among the participants.

Book Sample Pages and Spreads

Title page of a documentary photo essay titled 'We the People: The United States at 250', with a quote about the American Dream by James Truslow Adams and a caption crediting a photo of drum and bugle corps from Gebo Cemetery, Montana.
Side-by-side photos: left shows a young girl in a marching band uniform with yellow epaulets, standing in front of a yellow wall, and another girl in the background; right shows a man in a red coat walking out of a building at night in Memphis, Tennessee.
Side-by-side photos of two groups: on the left, two women in dark and white religious robes sitting on wooden benches in a church or hall, smiling and talking; on the right, a group of Native American men and women in traditional colorful regalia, standing outdoors in a desert landscape under a blue sky.
A man and a young girl playing violin and guitar outdoors in a grassy field, and a woman and girl at a fair or festival with people in line, food trucks, and trees in the background.
Left image shows a group of men dressed in green and gray checkered suits with matching hats, standing on a sidewalk against a colorful mural. Right image depicts men dressed in 18th-century British military uniforms, resting inside a yellow and black bus, with one man in a red coat and a wide-brimmed hat in the foreground. 
A Photographer’s Reflection

Photography has long played a central role in how America sees, remembers, and questions itself. In We the People: A Portrait of America in the 21st Century, I use documentary photography to observe the cultural, social, political, and everyday realities shaping the country in the years leading up to its 250th anniversary.

Rather than approaching America as an argument, the project is rooted in witnessing. Traveling across more than 35 states, I photograph civic rituals, work, worship, celebration, landscape, public gatherings, and quiet moments of daily life. These images are meant to record the shifting realities of American society while also inviting reflection on identity, belonging, community, division, and shared experience.

The work is grounded in the American social documentary tradition, where photography becomes both record and interpretation. It allows individual encounters, gestures, and places to speak to larger questions about who we are and how we live together. Through this project, I am interested in how personal stories, regional differences, and public life become part of a broader portrait of the American condition.

We the People: A Portrait of America in the 21st Century is a long-term documentary photography project by Steven G. Smith examining American identity in the years leading up to the nation’s 250th anniversary. Photographed across more than 35 states, the project looks at how people gather, work, worship, celebrate, protest, remember, travel, and inhabit the shared spaces of American life.

Rooted in the American social documentary tradition, We the People approaches the country not as a political argument, but as an act of witness. Through photographs made in small towns, cities, rural landscapes, borderlands, churches, fairs, parades, public ceremonies, roadside spaces, and everyday communities, the project explores the complexity of contemporary America. It considers questions of belonging, citizenship, regional identity, faith, labor, landscape, cultural tradition, civic ritual, and the quiet moments that shape daily life.

At a time of deep polarization, We the People seeks to look carefully at the people and places that make up the United States. The work is interested in gesture, humor, dignity, contradiction, resilience, and the visual poetry of ordinary experience. Rather than reducing the country to a single narrative, the project embraces its diversity, tension, beauty, and uncertainty.

Steven G. Smith is a documentary photographer, cinematographer, and visual storyteller whose work has been recognized nationally and internationally. With We the People, he continues a long-form photographic practice focused on community, place, and the human consequences of history and change. The project connects contemporary American life to a broader documentary legacy that includes the Farm Security Administration photographers, Robert Frank’s The Americans, and generations of photographers who used the camera to examine the nation’s evolving identity.

We the People: A Portrait of America in the 21st Century is intended as a photographic record of this moment in American life. Through still photography, exhibition, publication, and multimedia storytelling, the project invites viewers to consider what it means to live together in a vast, divided, beautiful, and complicated country. It is a portrait of America as it is being lived now, in public and private, in celebration and uncertainty, in difference and connection.