America By Another Name:
Photos and Stories of the Road and a History that United Us
Overview
With the promises of equality found in both the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution currently so threatened, the need for my proposed book’s egalitarian exploration of American life—as seen through my camera’s empathetic lens—is greater than ever. My book’s organizing principle is the once ubiquitous patriotic symbol around which Americans had worked toward a sense of unity amidst our diversity. This antique symbol, now contested, has not only inspired my thinking, it has also directed my GPS navigator on a truly national odyssey.
From Maine to Hawaii, from Alaska to Florida, I’ve made multiple roadtrips, totaling well over 160,000 miles, exclusively to streets, towns, cities, counties—and more—named Columbia. In over 65 of these locales, I’ve photographed diverse peoples and places. The images and writings in America By Another Name: Photos and Stories of the Road and a History that United Us put the reader in the passenger seat of my tricked-out 2012 camper van for a wide-ranging voyage through our modern, variegated culture, all the while grounded in an enlivening, historical theme.
Starting off slowly in 1738 as a somewhat satirical and rebellious name for the 13 Colonies, then gaining steam in the 1770s and ebbing in the 1920s, Columbia was used by poets, songwriters, orators, and even everyday people as a sort of poetic nickname for the United States. As the American Revolution’s crisis of identity and confidence took hold, a young, formerly enslaved African American poet of Boston named Phillis Wheatley wrote a poem to George Washington in which she conceived a new, classically inspired liberty goddess that she named Columbia. My book will include public domain images depicting the rise and fall of America’s guardian spirit, known variously as Lady Columbia or Miss Columbia.
I also show how, starting in 1777, the hymn “Ode to Columbia” so heartened Continental soldiers with its bright vision for their new country that, years later, the war’s veterans spread this poetic nickname across the land. The song also made Columbia a symbol of liberty, union, and progress—a set of hard-to-define cultural values that would inform our perennial struggle to build a national identity from diverse peoples. And then when disunity threatened in the 1790s, the song “Hail, Columbia” reminded citizens of their common purpose and became our de facto national anthem until officially replaced in 1931 by “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
As I ventured to capture the lives of our fellow countrymen living in various gradations of poverty and riches, precarity and safety, I kept Columbia’s values in mind: How does this person experience liberty, or the unity of this country, or this thing we call progress? Gathered in these pages even as on this land, I show the reader experiences and identities that some may see as disparate, or even antagonistic: nudists and the Knights of Columbus; evangelical Christians and transgendered women; a white kid in a coonskin cap and Native Americans in regalia; and Confederate apologists and a multiracial group on a dais before the National Archives.
In the center of the front row in that National Archives photograph is African American journalist and cultural historian A’Lelia Bundles. In 2006, her biography about her great-great-grandmother, African American hair-care magnate Madam C.J. Walker, revealed to me that some of my paternal ancestors had enslaved Madam Walker’s parents in the antebellum South. In the afterword Bundles writes for America By Another Name, she explores how our shared family histories affect her friendship with me today.
Madam Walker’s biography also highlighted that these aforementioned paternal ancestors helped settle Columbia, Tennessee. Similarly, my maternal ancestry reveals an anti-Indigenous massacre related to Columbia, Connecticut. Through these and more, the reader witnesses my grappling with the twin inheritances born of the racialized violence that underpinned the pluck and ingenuity that built our nation: white privilege that has facilitated my life journey and unwanted racist and hierarchical thinking.
Fittingly, within the Columbia name itself we find a split between its implied liberty, union, and progress, and the name’s roots in that of the great vanguard of modern empire, Christopher Columbus. While some may debate whether a nation may be both republic and empire, the latter’s violence and dispossession are clearly inimical to the former’s promised equality.
My Columbia journey began in 2010 when, amidst the nation’s struggles to recover from the 2008 financial meltdown, my fellow tenants and I were evicted from our building in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. As I’d already been eager to create a photobook about American life and culture, my ability to become a digital nomad helped me turn a would-be catastrophe into a life-affirming journey. I keep the reader oriented in my pilgrimage with photo captions, and brief introductions to geographically based portfolios. These elements combine with other written stories and salient looks at history to enrich the reader’s enjoyment.
Columbia—as goddess; as poetic nickname for our nation and for many places locally; as a conflicted symbol of liberty, union, and progress—has helped me reveal a new understanding of who and what this nation has been, is now, and may become. With current events and the U.S. semiquincentennial having us in a reflective mood, now is the time for a book exploring Columbia’s deep, historical significance, and its potential, future hope.
Author
The minute the training wheels came off his bicycle in 1971, author and photographer Francis Smith was riding way too far from the house.
After studying photography and art history at Vassar College, Smith upgraded his ride to a tiny pickup truck that doubled as a camper and embarked on the first of what would be dozens of road trips across the United States.
Aside from a successful fundraising campaign in 2014, he’s supported his America By Another Name journey by photographing the homes of art collectors for four different magazines: Native American Art, Western Art Collector, American Fine Art, and American Art Collector. His endeavors afford him diverse encounters with American life—one day photographing at a collector’s home in Malibu, another day at NASCAR, and another at a tin roof shack in Arkansas.
When he’s not pursuing his perennial passions for art and travel, Smith’s love for natural history and for the occasional night of dancing keep him going.
Details / Schedule
The vast majority of this book’s photographs have been taken and edited, and the writings can be done expeditiously.
I look forward to receiving a publishing editor’s notes on filling in photographic gaps in socioeconomic and cultural representation (e.g., Asian Americans, the upper middle class, Jewish and Muslim Americans). Having a publisher will much more readily open the doors of otherwise reticent individuals and groups.
Positioning
Photography
Travel
Social Sciences
American Studies / History
Pop Culture
Coffee Table
Physical Description
9.5”W x 0.8”D x 12”H
Approximately 150 pages
Color photographs
All images copyright Francis Smith
Historical images in public domain