2025
Who Are You, America?
Ten thousand miles through American deserts, forests, and open highways that promise freedom - yet landscapes are fenced, ticketed, and commodified.
A photographic journey across the western and southern United States — from Seattle to Texas - trough ten thousand miles and countless of memories. The series traces the landscapes that have come to define the American imagination: vast deserts, monumental forests, open highways, and meticulously preserved parks. It asks how a nation constructs its identity through land.
Coming from an ex-Yugoslav country, “America” was always larger than life - a dream built from television, cinema, and the promise of freedom. For those of us who grew up in aftermath of collapse and transitions, it represented movement, possibility, and reinvention. And while we now recognize that what the United States stand for today its contradictions, inequalities, and myth of exceptionalism, that lingering sense of something bigger, almost sacred, still remains. This project began with longing: to travel, to see, to feel free. Yet as the journey unfolded, freedom began to reveal itself as fragile, even illusory. Every landscape carried signs of control and ownership - fences cutting through fields, warning signs on fragile soil, ticketed entry points to nature.
America calls itself “The land of the free,” but its geography is carefully managed, bordered, and commodified. What does freedom mean when it must be contained, permitted, or consumed? Driving through deserts, forests, and endless highways, I began to see “America” not only as a physical territory but as a performance — a stage for its own mythology. The landscapes were breathtaking, yet they also spoke of conquest, displacement, and denial. The same mountains that inspire awe were once sacred lands taken; the same roads that promise adventure were built upon erasure. Beauty and violence coexist in the same viewfinder.
In this project, nature becomes both subject and mirror. A way to understand how ideology seeps into the soil, how freedom is measured in square miles, and how power hides beneath the surface of beauty. The work doesn’t seek to expose or condemn, but to observe: to stand before these spaces and ask what they reveal about the stories we choose to believe. Here, the camera becomes a means of negotiation. Between reverence and discomfort, between wonder and guilt.
Who Are You, America? asks what it means to look at a country that defines itself through its landscapes, yet struggles to recognize what they hold. Through deserts and forests, highways and horizons, the work seeks to hold space for contradiction — between the ideal and the real, the untouched and the occupied, the dream and the ground beneath it.
Is this what freedom looks like?
