For more than two decades, Peter van Agtmael and Wesaam Al-Badry have found their Americas through photography. In Al-Badry's pictures, it is in the bodies of the laborers, farm workers, strippers, families and others that we find America — bodies connected through immediacy and physical touch, or alone between isolation and rapture. Van Agtmael’s pictures question the larger contexts; the forces unleashed after the September 11th attacks and their roots in our unresolved history of violence at home. 

Al-Badry came to the United States as an immigrant from Iraq after the first war in 1991. From that upheaval he became a citizen and has devoted his work to expressing a great tenderness towards the many communities that serve America while remaining largely invisible in the American story. 

Van Agtmael grew up in the DC suburbs, and discovered his America on military embeds as the civil war in Iraq took hold. The stories he heard and the things he saw led him home, to excavate the many layers of how we became who we are. 

These photographers have witnessed how the uneasy mix of anger, hope, fear, pride, and shame of participating in such contradictions make fertile ground for violence. What makes American myths so seductive? Why do we struggle to reconcile the greatness of the country with its layers of darkness? Scouring the country, Americas asks: whose realities need to be repressed, silenced, or disappeared for the myths to persist?