Harris Mizrahi is a photographer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY where he currently lives and often departs to wander and photograph in the less populated regions of America.
America is drowning and gasping for air. Driving through the country, that fact is not only visible but palpable. You can feel it your bones, passing through towns where more machines are broken than working and where those broken machines seem to outnumber the people they used to serve. I arrive at many places during the night and that haunting feeling is so intensified. That feeling of the complete unknown and only being able to see as far as your headlights allow you to. A similar uncertainty seems to haunt these towns inhabitants; the uncertainty and looming doom of their own trajectory in an age of economic and political flux.
I’ll walk into a bar and be the only unknown face; a “kid” from south Brooklyn. Sometimes I’ll even be asked the very and cliché question, “You know you’re a long way from home?” However that’s the idea; to be a long way from home in an unfamiliar and sometimes threatening place within a country I can still call my own. But, although America is my home, these places and these people are not my own. That sort of dichotomy can make a person feel deeply lost. I am an outsider tasked with connecting to people on the common ground that we share as a species.
To view more of Harris’ work, please visit his website!