Abstract

After the horrendous events of September 2001, photographer Peter Elliott loaded his cameras and some clothes into his car and began a cross-country journey, looking for the flag. He found it everywhere: painted on a retaining wall in Tacoma, flying over a trailer in Bozeman, carried billowing by a lone man walking a sandbar in Florida, made of plastic cups stuck in a fence in Mississippi, draped over a fake horse in Salinas, immaculately hanging from a Beverly Hills mansion's window. Home Front is both a tribute to the profound emotions of the country and a testament to Elliott's eye. His genius in these eighty-seven arresting images is to wed these serendipitous meetings with the flag to a language of light and composition that draws as much from classic landscape photography as it does from urban visual idioms. Elliott manages to convey here America's stirring and complex national character, one in which those who have not benefited from the nation's prosperity nonetheless feel the same sense of pride as those who have. With its inspiring introduction by Julia Reed, Home Front is the record—both somber and joyous—of Elliott's encounters with spontaneous patriotism.