America is a Circus Circus
United States, 2007 - 2026AMERICA IS A CIRCUS CIRCUS is a collection of photographs and short essays made across the United States between 2007 and 2026. Moving through highways, motels, monuments, parking lots, and other sites of America Banal, the book reimagines belonging, loneliness, and the absurd promise of something better.
Self-published, July 4, 2026. Handmade, First edition of 50, signed and numbered.
Paperback, 8 × 10 inches, 60 pages full color. Includes a 9.25 × 7.5 inch inkjet print.
Paperback, 8 × 10 inches, 60 pages full color. Includes a 9.25 × 7.5 inch inkjet print.
Printed at the Center for Photography in Woodstock by Jackson Porter Hardin in Kingston, New York.
Assembled in Ridgewood, New York.
$50 + $7 shipping to the lower 48.
Excerpt from “Beach Day”
The beach is overrated. It’s just a bunch of wet sand. And all those waves — we get it. People who like the beach are the same people who don’t “get” art. They don’t understand nuance or symbolism or metaphor or how two things can be true at once. They need to be beaten over the head by exposition, told why a painting is meaningful, spoken to like a child. The beach is so on the nose. Oh, you “love” the beach? Is your favorite hobby “breathing”? Why don’t you tell me about that “crazy dream” you had last night? And all that sand. It’s masochistic. The beach is for losers with no dreams or ambition. It’s bare minimum appreciation. It’s low-effort awe. And don’t even get me started on the moon.
Almost everyone has seen the moon and I bet almost everyone has some sort of opinion about it. Poems, songs, cave paintings, etchings, photographs, lithographs, maps, charts, films — is the moon our first muse? And why do we romanticize it? It’s just a hunk of dirt. It’s just a rock floating in the sky reflecting light. Even when it’s not there it’s still there, even when it’s half there it’s still there. What a grift, what a scam. And I can almost guarantee you that it stinks.
“Look at the moon!”, “Did you see the moon?”, “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie”, “On this harvest moon”, “Blue moon”, “It must have been moon glow”, “Moon River” — enough already. We give the moon so much credit and all it’s given us is melancholy and nostalgia and grief and yearning.
For millennia we were so enamored by the moon that we harnessed fire, rode lightning, made myth flesh, and breached the walls of heaven just to reach her. But there was no goddess waiting for us. No rabbit, no oracle, no river. Just dust, stone, and a silence so vast that we were unable to speak about her in quite the same way ever again. ✤