Mapping Dissonance: America 2025 is a visual archive of an extraordinary year in America.
This project began in January 2025 as an exploration of life increasingly lived through screens.
I wanted to document the forces shaping our everyday lives that were so difficult to make visible: AI beginning to hold our ideas and our intellect — and us letting go. The daily outsourcing of our inner lives to something that is, in the end, nothing. The slipping of life into surveillance; loneliness growing more visible by the day; a government that seemed to be saying yes to a warming planet. Contemporary life had already drifted into the unfamiliar, the alarming — and I wanted to bear witness to it.
What I did not anticipate was the seismic nature of the political change that followed, or the dramatic shift in my sense of America — to the world, and to my own identity. What began as an outward-facing study of modern life had suddenly turned inward, into a personal inquiry to understand the idea of America in my own life.
I grew up in Georgia with a familiar story about America — taught in classrooms, echoed at dinner tables, shaped through decades of travel as a photographer. America was a singular combination of law and freedom, tolerance and human dignity. However imperfect, often painfully so, it was always striving toward something better. It was a country that meant something beyond itself.
In 2025, that story came undone.
“When the world feels chaotic, collage emerges,” David Hockney observed. Mapping Dissonance is both documentation and self-inquiry — an examination of what happens when the maps we rely on, emotional, cultural, and political, shift beneath us. The images are liminal: blurred photographs, fragmented figures suspended in ambiguous space. I’ve explored political collage as an art form born to reflect a complex, muddied, disjointed society back onto itself.
I think of these objects as contemporary quilts, using media fragments, erasure, stitching, and repetitions to reflect a shifting America. “Defamiliarization” is the art of making the familiar seem strange by repeating, over and over, a kaleidoscope of views into the same numbing event. What is horrific has become normalized. I use color, inversion, and juxtaposition to tell the story of a society that has seemingly lost its way in the struggle toward justice, shared values, and a higher purpose.
The tearing of the social fabric is real, and the United States is forever changed. In this moment, art is not a luxury; it is essential — a reminder of who we are to each other and an insistence on voice and freedom of expression. There is no conclusion here. This is simply a record of attention: looking closely, holding onto beauty, and documenting rupture, all in the same frame.
And beginning to ask — what happens next?
About Nancy Richards Farese
Nancy Richards Farese is a documentary photographer, writer, and social entrepreneur whose work harnesses the power of visual storytelling to shape culture and drive social change. As the founder of PhotoPhilanthropy and CatchLight, she has built platforms dedicated to amplifying photography’s role in the public good. Her work spans children’s play in refugee contexts, Southern identity, and, most recently, American politics and a fracturing national identity.
Her books include Potential Space (MW Editions, 2021) and the award-winning I Still Speak Southern In My Head (Workshop Arts, 2024). A graduate of Vanderbilt University and the Harvard Kennedy School, she holds an MFA from Maine Media College. She lives and works in California. [Offcial Website]
