A powerful, moving collection of 170 portraits of Americans and their handwritten statements about what the American dream means to them. Shot by one photographer over twelve years, fifty states, and eighty thousand miles, American Dreams is a poignant, defining look at people from every walk of life and a remarkable exploration of what it means to be an American. Long fascinated by the idea of the “American Dream,” Canadian photographer Ian Brown set out to document, in photographs and words, what that dream means to Americans of all ages, races, identities, classes, religions, and ideologies. Over the course of twelve years, Brown traveled more than eighty thousand miles in an old truck, visiting all fifty states and connecting with hundreds of Americans. He knocked on people's doors; met them at town halls, diners, and factories; and approached them on main streets in small towns. He shot their portraits and asked them to write down their own American dreams. Their dreams and stories—which range from hopeful, moving, and optimistic to defiant, bitter, and heartbreaking—offer a fascinating, unparalleled perspective of the striking diversity and deep nuance of the American experience. Ian Brown is an award-winning photographer whose work focuses on the human condition. His portraits have been acclaimed for their simple depth of emotion and honesty. He survived cancer at the age of nineteen, a heart attack at age thirty-two, and being shot at in the middle of a civil war in Colombia while on assignment for Doctors Without Borders. His work has been featured in the New York Times , Washington Post , and a number of international publications. He lives in Toronto and continues to try perfecting making pancakes for his seven-year-old daughter. Introduction I still remember the voice, booming and sure, with an accent that was different from any I’d heard before. “Headed north,” it said. “Goin’ to see snow.” It was the summer of 1979, and I was on my annual summer visit with my grandparents. We had stopped to fill up on gas on the way to the quaint Canadian town of Lakefield, Ontario. My sister and I loved these forays into simple country life, where we had a ritual of getting ice cream and eating it at the bakery or by the lake. It was a typical Ontario summer day: hot, sticky, and humid, with the sound of cicadas singing and the hum of lawn mowers in the air. I couldn’t see the expression on my grandfather’s face from my spot in the back seat of his yellow 1976 Dodge Aries, but I imagine him smiling broadly as he responded. “Snow? You’ll be driving for quite a while until that happens.” I strained to look out the window and observe the man with the booming voice—he was very large and stood beside a big car with a back seat full of kids and a trunk packed with bags and suitcases. After a few minutes of pleasant conversation, my grandfather got back in the car and we headed into town. He explained that the loud-voiced guy was an American from somewhere “down South” who had packed up his family to drive north to Canada—in the summer, no less—to see snow. Granted, the internet hadn’t yet been invented, so it’s not as if the man could have googled it. But it was the late 1970s, so maps, books, newspapers, and television all did exist. And even though I was only in grade school, it seemed wildly presumptuous—and maybe even a little ignorant—to think that there would be snow in Ontario in the summer. As we pulled up to the Lakefield bakery to get ice cream, my grandparents shared a good laugh. “Americans!” they said knowingly to each other. The encounter with the loud man was the first time I understood that Americans were different. The voice, the tone, the accent, and the sureness with which he spoke made an impression on me. This man was certain that he was going to see snow, and he was willing to disregard the fact that he was sweating, the asphalt was searing hot, and the grass was brown. It was so intriguing, and made Americans seem particularly interesting to me. Who were they? As the northern neighbor of the world’s most powerful country, Canada has a unique perspective on the United States. As former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said in 1969, “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” The majority of Canada’s thirty-seven million people live within a hundred miles of the US border. We have all the same news sources, for the most part (Canada has their own stations, of course, but we tend to get our news from global sources), and anyone who grew up (as I did) in the 1970s and ’80s watched more American TV channels than Canadian ones. Living in Toronto, we got our US news feeds from Buffalo, New York. There was always something strangely fascinating about the number of fires and snowstorms that seemed to be reported on the Buffalo news. And Buffalo s