$49.95 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover (PLC)
336 pages with 250 color photographs and 5 color composite photographs by the author
11.0″ x 9.0″ landscape
ISBN 978–1–938086–78–6
Published in December 2020
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized.
Co-published with Stephen Marc in association with the Center for the Study of Place.
Events and Exhibitions
February 26, 2025 at 7pm
Artist Talk – Face to Face: Stephen Marc
Welcoming a Chicago Visionary Back Home
Chicago Center for Photojournalism
November 4, 2022 at 6p.m.
Artist and Book Talk
October 21 – November 19, 2022
An American Journey Continues (Solo Exhibition)
Northlight Gallery, Phoenix, AZ
May 19, 2021 at 6pm
Online conversation between ICP’s Managing Director of Programs David Campany and Stephen Marc
International Center of Photography (ICP)
Interview with Marc in Pomona College Magazine (2023)
by Stephen Marc
with an introduction by Bill Kouwenhoven and an interview with the artist by Rebecca A. Senf
Finalist for both best art book and best multicultural book of the year from the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards.
From 2007 to 2020, spanning the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, noted photographer Stephen Marc traveled throughout America in search of its people. He went to parades and protests, memorials and celebrations, rallies and rodeos, amusement parks and festivities, historic sites and city streets to see America as it is: multi-colored, multi-cultural, multi-racial, gender rich, and more diverse and urban than ever before in the nation’s history. Behind each of the book’s 250 compelling images is a patriotic reminder of America’s robustness and promise and ongoing struggles with race and socio-economic issues as it seeks to become, as Abraham Lincoln declared in 1862, “a more perfect union.”
Stephen Marc’s American/True Colors complements other significant photographic surveys of modern America: from Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson to Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Mary Ellen Mark, Eli Reed, Bruce Davidson, Zoe Strauss, Leonard Freed, Vivian Maier, and others. But no photographer has so fully looked at America, from coast to coast, as has Stephen Marc with his unique African-American perspective.
American/True Colors is further enriched by a long interview with the artist by Rebecca A. Senf, Norton Family Curator of Photography at the Center for Creative Photography, and by a Jack Kerouac-like introductory essay by writer/critic Bill Kouwenhoven, who concludes: “Stephen Marc’s vision leaves me breathless, and his eyes, as represented by his kaleidoscopic images, are vibrant testimony to the love he feels for our contradictory and self-contradicting land, one that too often seems at war with itself over the very shape of these United States.”
About
About the Author
Stephen Marc is a documentary/street photographer and digital montage artist, who was raised on the South Side of Chicago. He is Professor of Art at Arizona State University, where he began teaching in 1998, after twenty years on the faculty of the Department of Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Marc has received grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his awards include the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art and the Society for Photographic Education’s Insight Award. In 2021, Marc was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography. Marc has published three photography books: Passage on the Underground Railroad (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience: Street Life and Culture in Ghana, Jamaica, England, and the United States (Columbia College Chicago, 1992), and Urban Notions (Ataraxia Press, 1983). Since 2008, Passage on the Underground Railroad has been listed as an Interpretative Program of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a division of the National Park Service.
About the Contributors
Bill Kouwenhoven is an independent photography critic, curator, and essayist who focuses on documentary and photo-journalism. He has written for Hotshoe, Photo Metro Magazine, and World Press Photo, among other publications, and he has curated and provided introductory essays for more than fifteen monographs and for Nuevas Historias (Hatje Cantz, 2008), an overview of contemporary Spanish photography and video arts.
Rebecca A. Senf is the Norton Family Curator of Photography at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. Her books include Making a Photographer, a major new book on Ansel Adams (Yale University Press, in association with the Center for Creative Photography, 2020), Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe (University of California Press, 2017), and To Be Thirteen, showcasing the work of Betsy Schneider (Radius Press and Phoenix Art Museum, 2017).
Slide Show
Praise
“This timely book presents a rollicking swing through the rambunctious diversity inscribing our country today. Rather than paper over our societal divisions, Marc’s vibrant pictures celebrate our cultural multiplicity and assertiveness, for it is here that he locates what it is to be American.”
—John Rohrbach, Senior Curator of Photographs, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and author of Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke
“Time IS the essence for two superb and significant books published during the past year about two leading Arizona photographers, Mark Klett and Stephen Marc. Mark Klett: Seeing Time, Forty Years of Photographs (University of Texas Press) and American / True Colors (George F. Thompson Publishing) should be on the shelf or table of anyone interested in photographers of our great state. … while Stephen Marc’s work of the last twelve years has focused on moments of time at community events across America such as parades, protests, historic site events, rallies and ceremonies. For over two decades, he has focused his art on social justice, race and everyday struggles in communities.”
—Jim Ballinger, Director Emeritus of Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona Photography Alliance (click for photos and article here)
“In 1831, French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States, a still-young nation, and returned home convinced he had seen a self-determined and even arrogant people who existed nowhere else on the planet. By then, Andrew Jackson had claimed the White House for a cross-section of voters who might be best described as the “little guy” (so long as the little guy looked like him). But his feat occurred while Sojourner Truth had already fled slavery only to return to successfully sue her master for selling her son. She had help from someone who looked like Jackson, too.
“American/True Colors puts on display the audacity of a people who strangely emerge. Some manifest like a drunk uncle who, despite his perceived flaws, is still family. More than enough has happened in recent years to show how we boldly sort through such a contradiction and often without ever saying as much. As did Walker Evans, Jacob Riis, and Gordon Parks, among others, a snapshot of that “sorting through” is offered in Stephen Marc’s compelling photographs. They deftly illuminate our complicated times when everyone still gets to make claims, however violently and troubling, on the possibilities of the American dream. This persistent and audacious claiming is what makes America still special. Whether we are hoisting up or kneeling before the flag, we unflatten the hurdles to becoming the family we already are—whether we like it or not.”
—Sharony Green, Associate Professor of History, University of Alabama, and author of Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America
“Street work in photography requires a myriad of skills. Social skills require photographers to interact with their subjects, put them at ease, and establish trust while at the same time becoming invisible, thus permitting the photographer to work. Technical skills require photographers to calculate the exposure and focus and make numerous split-second decisions in regard to camera position, lighting, and framing. These skills are mastered over years of practice, and, although they are critical to creating a successful image, in the hands of an experienced photographer, when done with mastery and precision, they take a back seat to subject matter.
“The street photographs by Stephen Marc are made with the precision we expect from a seasoned photographer. Marc’s strong compositions and his use of color and framing allow his subjects to scream off the page in this beautifully designed book. In the current political environment of America, we all need to view and pay close attention to what Stephen Marc is sharing with us through his photographs, aptly titled American/True Colors.”
—David Scheinbaum, Professor Emeritus and former Director/Chair of the Photography Department, College of Santa Fe, and author of Hip-Hop: Portraits of an Urban Hymn and, with Janet Russek, Remnants: Photographs of the Lower East Side
“Stephen Marc’s photographs in American/True Colors, are a celebration of the complexity of life in America, and each image provides a window into the soul of this beautiful and great country. This book is nothing less than a modern-day road trip through time and space, where the individual and collective American consciousness is made manifest. American/True Colors, with Stephen Marc at the wheel, is a trip you’ll want to go on.”
—Carlos Diaz, photographer and Professor in the Center for Creative Studies, College of Art and Design
My Place
Trying to choose and/or identify a single location as “My Place” was more challenging than it should be. I have always been a wanderer, going from place-to-place to visit family, attend college (near Los Angeles and Philadelphia), to photograph, or just to entertain and satisfy my curiosity. Although I grew up in Chicago, Champaign, Illinois, has always been my home-away-from-home. I also spent significant time in Michigan at the family farmhouse and for summer camp; frequently visited Cape May, New Jersey; and made numerous road-trips as a member of a family defined by the automobile.
Photograph © Stephen Marc.
So, after all that, the place I have selected to share is in my old backyard: Chicago’s Promontory Point, locally known as “The Point.” It is a community hang-out located in the neighborhood where I attended high school and is easily within walking distance from where I lived for most of my adult life before I moved to Arizona. This was a park that, in my time, was a place where everybody could go, which was, and is, not something to be taken for granted.
Promontory Point is not just my place, but it a City of Chicago Park District jewel in Burnham Park on the shore of Lake Michigan. It is in the Southside neighborhood of Hyde Park, which I always think of as the University of Chicago’s village, with a view of the downtown Chicago skyline to the north and to the south the high-rise apartment buildings of South Shore and the steel mills of southeast Chicago and Gary, Indiana.
“The Point” is only a few blocks away from the Museum of Science and Industry and the Midway, two significant landmarks remaining from the 1893 World’s Fair. From my high school years, I remember the removal of the fenced-in military installation that housed radar towers, making “The Point” much more beautiful and inviting.
Entering “The Point” through a Lake Shore Drive underpass almost has the ambiance of a giant seashell: often accompanied by the beat of music, the echoed voices of other visitors, and the muted background sounds of the streets. The emergence into the park is like stepping into a different world where you can feel the change of the seasons, leaving behind the business of the day and the hustle of the streets. Just don’t forget to look both ways before crossing the bike path and avoid tripping over the dogs heading to rehydrate at the canine-friendly fountain after a heavy day of play and the ambitious attempts to mark every tree.
Even though I no longer live in Chicago, at least I know “The Point” is still there. When I go back to the city, it is still a special place that I stop to visit; where on a beautiful summer day I confirm that I must be living right, after finding an almost impossible place to park the car. Sometimes I find old friends; if not, I make new ones or just appreciate the moment by myself.
Copyright © 2020 Stephen Marc. All rights reserved.