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Photographer John Noltner travels the world to bring people together. For the past 15 years, his nonprofit multimedia project, A Peace of Mind, has set up a mobile studio in cities and towns across four continents, recording interviews with residents and taking their portraits — art that he hopes will help reveal their shared values, challenges, and dreams.
John Noltner traveled 93,000 miles and photographed many Americans living on the country’s divides.
Nonprofits invite Noltner to their community, pick a theme to explore, and recruit a range of people. Participants reflect on questions that don’t have easy answers. When have you found unexpected courage? A sense of belonging? Have you ever reached across a divide to someone different from you?
“Even across language barriers, even across cultural divides, this chance to see themselves and their peers in this way is transformative and positive,” Noltner says.
Recently, Noltner projected 180 portraits onto a Main Street grain elevator in New York Mills, Minn., as seen here. Each image was accompanied by a quote from the subject about what it means to belong. “That sense of community and that sense of common experience is really, I think, a lasting effect that ripples through communities,” Noltner says.
Noltner’s long career as a photographer for magazines (National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Forbes), nonprofits, and major corporations inspired A Peace of Mind. “I found this beauty and wisdom in everybody that I encountered,” he says. “The things that really moved me were these stories of people who found themselves in difficult or precarious situations and made the very intentional choice to move forward.”
Noltner looked at America’s divisions and decided to use his portraits to help people see what he saw from behind the lens: the courage, grace, and resilience that so many people share.
One person’s story can’t convey all that, Noltner says. “But when you start weaving together these threads of experience and you start looking at that complexity and you start understanding how different people are experiencing these really challenging issues in our world, we start to understand it in a new way.”
‘People Lighting the Way’
The pandemic forced Noltner to temporarily shut down A Peace of Mind programming. Restless and seeking purpose, he and his wife, Karen, sold their Minneapolis home and hit the road. Traveling 93,000 miles over more than two years while living out of a camper, they stopped in big cities and small towns across the country — Charleston, S.C.; Houma, La.; Parkersburg, W.Va.; Yuma, Ariz.; and more. In each place, they took photos, interviewed residents, and listened deeply to a country rattled by Covid and reckoning with its history of racism after the murder of George Floyd.
Earlier this year, Noltner published Lessons on the Road to Peace, a compilation of his photos, interviews, and observations from the journey. “After all those miles on the road, here’s the secret answer,” he writes. “There is no secret answer. There is no us and them. We are all a part of the problem, and we are all a part of the solution.”
“All across the country, there are people lighting the way, illuminating the challenges, and offering creative solutions.”
Below are excerpts from a few of Noltner’s interviews.
Lee Bennett Jr. grew up a few blocks from Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., home to the oldest Black congregation in the South. Lee is a longtime member of the congregation and the church’s volunteer historian. A retired Army officer, he spent several years as deputy chief of staff in the White House Drug Control Policy Office.
In 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine worshippers at the church gathered for a Bible study.
It’s God’s house; the doors of the church are always open. That has not changed. This is not the first time tragedy has knocked on the doors. This church is a resilient church. We lost nine people that time. We lost 35 others back in 1822; they were all hung. We are a resilient church, and we’re going to be around for another 200 years.
I’m hopeful. It’s sometimes hurtful that it takes these sacrifices for [change] to happen. Nine lives lost, to remove a flag over the Capitol? A man choked to death to remove it? That’s a great price to pay to start these dialogues and to recognize the imbalance. So I’m cautious with hope — hope at a cost.
We owe ourselves to tell the truth, and the church has a large part in that. As uncomfortable as it may be, the church has to take the responsibility to tell the truth. The most segregated day in the world is Sundays. People go their different ways. Who are your friends? Go to people’s funerals, and you look around and you see either everybody looks like me or everybody looks like you, when there should be some type of blending. We have to recognize our roles to fix things. It shouldn’t be the burden of the oppressed people to say, “I got all the answers.” We’re all in this together.
Emily Liner grew up in Mississippi. She went to college at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and stayed to work in politics. She returned to her home state in 2020 and opened Friendly City Books in Columbus.
We are so divided as a country. We are physically divided, we are geographically divided, and we so rarely encounter people who are different from us. We are starting to segregate ourselves from people who don’t have the same values as we do.
I came from a red state — Mississippi — and lived in Washington D.C., which, if it were a state, would be the bluest blue. I worked for a company based in San Francisco — again, very dark, dark blue. And I started to realize that the conversations I had with people about politics were more difficult outside of Washington, D.C., than they were inside.
I had great relationships with people across the political spectrum when I lived in Washington, D.C., but when I would come home to Mississippi, I always felt like I was having to defend my liberal politics to my conservative friends and family. And when I went to San Francisco, I always felt like I had to defend my more moderate sensibilities with the progressives in that community.
Alma and Juan Bosco Sandigo live on a ranch in Yuma, Ariz., where they raise Peruvian Paso horses. Alma was born in Mexico City and Juan Bosco grew up in the green coastal mountains of Nicaragua. They both immigrated to the United States decades ago and have become U.S. citizens.
Alma: Who has the right to put the flag outside? If you test me, you can see that I am a good citizen. I have fulfilled my civic duties and I don’t run away from paying taxes. I pushed my family to go forward. But it seems that all of those values are diminished because I may not [be] the right color or have the right accent to be called American.
Juan Bosco: It feels like you [have] to prove yourself to be a worthy citizen. When somebody adopts an individual into their family, after a time, they don’t question if [that person is] now part of the family. It is just family, end of the story. It’s not the same with immigrants.
Alma: It’s because they don’t see me as part of their group, [not that] I don’t see myself as an American. We visited Germany. We were looking at each other, speaking Spanish to each other. A German [man] comes down and says, “Hey, you Americans.” Why is it easier for people from other countries to say, “Hey, you Americans” than here in the United States?
Juan Bosco: In the States, we’re always foreigners. Outside the States, we’re always Americans.
Bazile Panek is a student at Northern Michigan University majoring in Native American studies. He is an enrolled member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Red Cliff, Wis.
I’m conducting academic research on decolonizing entrepreneurship by Anishinaabe people and how traditional values can be integrated into entrepreneurship. When we think of entrepreneurship and business, we think of money, we think of capitalism, we think of white people. There are ways that we can decolonize entrepreneurship to integrate our traditional values and perspectives on leadership and business.
I joined a business student organization where it was required that you wear a fancy suit and tie and dress shoes. I had never worn that before because for Native people, business attire is ribbon shirts, beaded medallions, beaded earrings, and moccasins. Being required to wear a suit and tie was odd for me. I didn’t feel as confident. I took a step back; I didn’t speak as much.
Instead of a tie, I put on a beaded medallion along with the suit. It was kind of a decolonized tie, if you will. Wearing that beaded medallion with my suit made me feel more confident. I was more willing to speak in a meeting or put myself out there.
Simran Jeet Singh is executive director of the Religion and Society Program at the Aspen Institute and author of “The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life.” Simran aspires to build a pluralistic world that allows all people to thrive.
Probably the most important part of who I am is that I’m a Spurs fan. Basketball. I grew up in San Antonio. It’s something people don’t really expect about me. They see the turban, they see the beard, they see the brown skin. They assume me to be a foreigner who has no idea about what pop culture and sports culture in America is.
Growing up in Texas as a religious minority and as part of a faith community that really shows up visibly — we literally wear our religion on our heads. My turban announces to people that I’m different. I’ve been on the other side of religious intolerance for a lot of my life, and I’ve learned firsthand how painful and exclusionary that can be.
Sometimes it’s malicious in the ways that you might expect. Like people saying things to me or refusing me service. That’s happened. But sometimes it’s more innocuous, where people have questions or there are rules in place.
You’re constantly having to pick and choose where and how to fit in. And there are sacrifices that are being made. For me, the vision of religious pluralism is one where everyone gets to thrive. We can create conditions that account for everyone that are more flexible, that don’t center just one community but really make sure that everyone is set up for success in this country.
Christopher Montoya was a border patrol agent in Arizona for 21 years until he retired in 2017. A year later, he wrote a controversial op-ed piece for the “Arizona Daily Star” refuting narratives that “characterize the U.S.–Mexico border as a ‘very dangerous’ place for law enforcement.” As a graduate student at the University of Arizona, he researched statistics and data from local, state, and federal agencies and found that “Border Patrol agents enjoy one of the safest law enforcement jobs in America.”
We were on the border at night, walking right along the border in Douglas [Ariz.], and all of a sudden rocks are flying over the fence. Big rocks. At your head. So what do you do? You have choices. You can run to the fence and start shooting into Mexico, you can stand there and get hit in the face with a rock, or you can back up.
It’s true that throwing rocks at agents has hurt agents before. It’s rare, but it’s happened. My approach to discerning this idea of a violent border is looking at the hard evidence. And the evidence [says] that it’s exceedingly rare. But [when] my op-ed came out, people were pissed off. They didn’t like what I said. And I get it.
Data and statistics — you can’t refute them, but they under-represent somebody’s lived experience. It’s subjective. If I tell a border patrol agent [who got hit by a rock] the results of my study, he’s going to tell me I’m full of shit. If I tell a person at the university, I’m going to get a standing ovation. That’s where I’m trying to live — in that gray area — because that’s the hardest place to live in the world.
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