'We The People'

WE THE PEOPLE’ Photographs by Myriam Abdelaziz In 2015 I received an email from my immigration attorney asking me if I was ready to file for American citizenship. I realized then that I didn't know if I was… Ready to become an American citizen, what did that mean? Was this who I was now: a potential American citizen? Living in New York for over 10 years I knew I was ready to be called a New Yorker, but an American? That wasn't so clear. I took time to think about it, wondering if I would fit in, wondering if this is where my heart was. A year later I still had doubts so I decided to take the road, to go meet the rest of the country, to go meet the ‘People’. I wanted to find out who were the Americans and what it meant to be an American. I drove 10000 miles over the course 3 months and photographed the people I randomly met during the trip. On Nov. 8th 2016, Donald Trump was elected as the new President of the United States, leaving the international community surprised by the choice of the Americans: Who voted for him? What hapened? What will happen? ‘We the People’ is a catalog of Americans photographed throughout the whole country from all paths of life, background, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, social class, political affiliation and sexual orientation, just as they are. My goal is to understand them and to see them as one by bringing them together instead of separating them and labeling them because “We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”