Chris Austermann

Artist Statement

What stops you in your tracks?

For most people, the answer comes without thinking. A flag snapping in the wind against a storm sky. A hand-painted barn mural in the middle of a cornfield. A front porch draped in red, white, and blue long after the parade has passed. These are not monumental moments. They are ordinary ones. And yet something in us pauses.
Researchers at UC Berkeley have spent years studying that pause. Psychologist Dr. Dacher Keltner describes awe as the emotion we feel when we encounter something that challenges our existing understanding of the world and expands it. Awe is most reliably triggered not by grand spectacles, but by the vast, the unexpected, and the deeply human. It slows us down. It connects us to something larger than ourselves.

"American Spirit" was built from that pause.

Over the past several years, I have photographed expressions of American patriotism wherever I have found them: on farms and front porches, in small towns and city streets, at rodeos and lighthouses, in roadside stops and national parks. The images in this composite span dozens of states and every kind of landscape. They include flags, hand-painted murals, folk sculptures, digital installations, woven textiles, and decorative art. What these images share is not a political statement. What they share is that someone, somewhere, chose to say: I am proud of this country. And they said it in their own way.

The format of this piece is deliberate. By fitting these photographs inside the shape of the United States itself, the work asks a simple question: what does America look like when you fill it with the people who live here? The answer is not uniform. It is a Betsy Ross flag painted on a tree trunk in a backyard. It is a flag draped over a split-rail fence at sunset in the Midwest. It is a garden sculpture crafted from clay pots on a suburban lawn. It is a stop sign wrapped in bunting at a country crossroads. It is a lighthouse at the edge of Maine and a flag waving in the breeze in Florida.

The science of awe tells us that experiences of vastness and connection have measurable effects on human well-being. Awe reduces self-focus, increases generosity, and builds a sense of belonging to something beyond ourselves. I have felt this in the field, standing in places I did not expect to find beautiful, photographing people I did not expect to move me. The flag is familiar. But familiarity is not the same as being seen. This work asks the viewer to see again.

"American Spirit" belongs to my Expressions in Patriotism collection, developed over years of intentional photography. It is offered here as what it is: a celebration of variety, a record of presence, and an invitation to pause. As the country marks its 250th anniversary, the question worth sitting with is not what divides us. It is how many different ways 330 million people have found to say they belong here.