Americans Seen is a photographic series created by Sage Sohier between 1979 and 1986, a period when the young Boston-based photographer was dedicated to capturing fragments of everyday life in the United States. This project, set in a pre-digital era less marked by paranoia, focuses on families, children, and teenagers who inhabited their neighborhoods as genuine stages for sociality and spontaneity.
«In that pre-digital and less paranoid era, families—and especially children and teenagers—spent time in their neighborhoods. A kind of street theater emerged from the boredom of hot summer days, and it was a perfect time to photograph people outdoors», Sohier recalls. The photographer connects these scenes to her childhood, often spent in the basement of a neighbor’s house, staging theatrical productions with neighborhood kids: «Undoubtedly, my childhood afternoons helped shape my vision of children’s play as a kind of ritual or performance».
During the seven years she worked on this series, Sohier explored the ethnic and working-class neighborhoods of Boston, where triple-deckers, porches, vacant lots, clotheslines, and tree stumps became theatrical backdrops for her intricate portraits. In the statement accompanying the project, the photographer admits being visually fascinated by these elements, which gave structure and depth to her images.
During the hottest summers, Sohier would head to seaside towns, while every year she embarked on a road trip: from rural Pennsylvania through decaying Newburgh, New York, to the coal-mining areas of West Virginia and the Mormon enclaves of Utah and Idaho. In winter, however, the southern United States became her destination: agricultural regions of Florida or the panhandle up to New Orleans and Cajun Country. «On these pre-GPS wanderings, I eagerly anticipated the adventure of getting lost and discovering the unexpected», Sohier says, emphasizing how photography granted her the privilege of meeting an extraordinary variety of people.
«I’m grateful to all the strangers I photographed during those years—trusting people who were open to collaborating with me (intuitively, often without needing words) to create something vivid and, in a sense, authentic». This spirit of collaboration and the ability to create portraits that capture the essence of a moment make Americans Seen an extraordinary document of culture and human relationships in a bygone era.
With this series, Sage Sohier not only narrates the reality of an authentic and often overlooked America but also invites the viewer to reflect on the meaning of human connection and the power of photography to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
