The Americans I Met “The French talk incessantly about France. The Germans talk about Germany. The Italians talk about Italy and the Chinese about China. But everyone talks about America, and they have done for 200 years. By America we mean specifically the United States. As if no matter what the world signified – in some larger scheme of things – it could only be understood in terms of this place and what it might become and has become, with its genocidal origins, pathological individualism, “desolate frenzy of unbounded technology,” naïve belief in personal generosity, its Darwinian social landscape and an absolute void where any notion of “the state” might be. A void filled by money, revealed religion (Christianity), drug use, firearms purchases and media content“.

The famous Robert Frank, the Swiss native, found precisely the things he could not find in postwar Europe, which is why he came in the first place: naïve patriotism, fundamentalist religion, vibrant subcultures, social ambiguity, and African Americans. His tour had its dark side, especially in images of jingoist genuflection before the flag and an obvious segregation of the races.

Hübner absorbed and stylistically updated the roadwork of many photographers (Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Mitch Epstein, among others), in addition to fellow Germans such as Thomas Struth, who traveled to Yosemite and El Capitan to show us the line of parked cars and tourists ready to click away. But Hübner also engaged the strategies of conceptual and performance art. He made rules, set up a system, let it run, and went where the process took him. No rental cars, no hotels, no public transportation, no Internet booking, no sex with the people he met, only enough money for food and film, be open to what people said, don’t cut them off. If this sounds risky – 16,000 miles (26,000 km) of it covered between 2017 and 2019 – consider that this all took place during the Trump presidency, when “culture wars” became a battle cry and the notion that high fences make good neighbors became more than a metaphor.

Hübner is the opposite of Robert Frank. Where Frank sought theme and pattern, with undertones of menace and revelation, Hübner seeks anomaly and apparition – sudden inexplicability. He is open to the absurd in a way Frank never was. This vision is balanced – or better to say augmented – by many attentive and even appreciative portraits, where judgement is put aside. Given the total penetration of social media, we are inundated with pictures of people we don’t know and have no connection to, often doing silly things. The notion of photographic portraiture has gone out the window. But in this book, the portraits play a key role. They slow down the pace of travel and shift attention from events to persons, from stereotypes to individuals, from tourism to engagement. These capture a texture of humanity, people who breathe outside the frame. Maybe Americans really do have inner lives.

Yet the question remains, what has Hübner discovered in his travels? Is it simply what he brought with him, the myths, pop-cultural icons, sensational media coverage, and European skepticism about a nation too powerful for its own good? Based on what he has edited of his conversations – essential reading for this book’s photographs – they seem to confirm everything anyone might already have imagined. For one thing, Americans are deeply afraid, even suspicious of each other. People who are different, communities of otherness – these are not big tent virtues in Hübner’s America. It’s not just a question of monolithic racism or nationalism directed at people who don’t belong here (the Trump mantra), but a profound sense of fragmentation that reaches much deeper than any dog-whistle labels. As de Tocqueville understood so long ago, Americans are primed to be wary – of other Americans!

But if this were all Hübner discovered, he would have ended his journeys a lot earlier. What kept him going, I suspect, was something else that de Toqueville also marveled at: openness and generosity in the face of a completely unknown person, the stranger.

Hübner’s journey, photographs, and conversations represent an exploration of what it meant to be American in the Trump Era and the issues that continue to affect Americans personally and politically. Even though all the Americans he met belong to the same society, their existence often could not be more different. People’s lives took place in wholly divided communities, far away from each other, under vastly different circumstances and future perspectives. The distance is not only a physical range but also decisively separated by class, identity and ideology. In his photographs and written accounts, Hübner tried to convey these peoples’ environments, how they live, and the stories they told him. With only his camera and audio recorder, he found himself a wanderer between these different realities.

Text excerpts by Lyle Rexer & Viktor Hübner