“Listening to a Divided Nation: Field Notes from America’s Moral Fracture”
_ An independent field correspondent’s documentation of dignity, freedom, and the collapse of trust.
David Robert Farmerie is a photojournalist and independent field correspondent documenting the human undercurrents of division across the United States. Between 2015 and 2021, he had traveled more than 350,000 miles conducting sustained fieldwork with Americans across ideological, geographic, and economic lines as part of The In Search of America Project.
His work examines themes of dignity, freedom, institutional distrust, and the moral consequences of not being heard. Through photography, long-form narrative, and public lectures, David presents a ground-level portrait of American civic life that challenges partisan simplifications and foregrounds lived experience over abstraction.
His approach treats listening as disciplined inquiry rather than sentiment, positioning storytelling as a method of civic examination. His presentations have been delivered to civic and arts institutions and are increasingly oriented toward academic audiences concerned with political culture, journalism, and democratic trust.