IN STORES LATE AUGUST 2010 FOR LABOR DAY

In AMERICAN PORTRAITS, acclaimed photographer Michael Clinton captures the diverse faces that make up the modern-day American mosaic. In each of the 121 countries that Clinton has visited in his travels, he has met people enthralled by the idea of coming to America; whether it be a hopeful boy in Madagascar asking Clinton if he knows Barack Obama, or an elderly woman in a marketplace in Croatia talking about her dream to visit her brother living in Ohio. While on a search for his own roots, Clinton met a woman in Lithuania who looked like she could have been part of his own American family. This surprise encounter inspired Clinton to investigate the heritages and stories of other Americans and their ancestries.

Together, the 93 Americans in these portraits trace their ancestry to 100 different countries. Through this visual journey, we meet Americans like Renee Dominique, descended from Afghanis, Irish, and Trinidadians; Russ Theriot, who is Canadian, French, Norwegian, and Cajun, and Andrea Luhtanen with a mixed Slovenian and Finnish background. Each portrait reminds us that there can be no singular image of what an American looks like. The Americans that Clinton photographed have varying skin tones, hair colors, heights and shapes.

While the images remind us just how diverse Americans look, the brief autobiographical descriptions appearing on the page of each subject prove that what binds all Americans together is our forefathers' dreams for a better life. Timed for a Labor Day publication, American Portraits is also a testament to the power of "work." Captions provide the individual's name, bloodline and occupation and we see how these professions help define who they are, how they fit into this country, and also how work was critical to their ancestors' ability to live out the American Dream.

This is Clinton's first foray into portraiture and he spent two years searching for Americans of widespread and diverse ancestries, recording captivating stories that remind him of what America stands for, making him prouder than ever to be an American. It is this pride and diversity that translates into the portraits found in this book which make it so compelling and appealing.

About the author/photographer:

Michael Clinton is president, marketing and publishing director for Hearst Magazines. His responsibilities include oversight of 14 publications, including Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, O: The Oprah Magazine, Seventeen and Esquire. Clinton has served on the boards of the Volunteers of America and The Starlight Foundation. Currently, the author serves on the acquisitions committee of the International Center of Photography in New York and is an advisor to Friends Without Boarders. Clinton is also the author of Wanderlust: One Hundred Countries, Global Snaps, and Global Faces. He lives in New York City and Southampton, NY.

Foreword:

Within this book are ninety-three faces that will stick with you long after you've finished flipping through the pages. Photographer Michael Clinton began his project fueled by a passion for photography and profound love of country. He set out to find Americans from all stations, whose bloodlines can be traced back to one hundred individual countries.

The research often began with a simple request, a query delivered in the unlikeliest of places: a bustling restaurant, an elevator ascending a pre-war Manhattan apartment building, or a dinner party where conversation predictably centered on the obvious and the polite.

Clinton cut through all that. "Tell me your story," he would say to people he'd just met. The responses delighted him. The narratives were harrowing, sometimes heroic and always filled with hope. So began his documentation of the people willing to share their story and their image . . . wearing a smile as proudly as the history they brought to the surface. His extraordinary mosaic was coming to life.

In my years as a network journalist, the most frequent question I hear is, "Which assignment stands out the most?" The answer is never the story, always the people. It is the faces I remember best.

As the crisis of Hurricane Katrina unfolded, I saw the diabetic woman who sought shelter without her medicine in the Convention Center. As she pleaded for help, she collapsed before our camera. An off-duty nurse begged for insulin from the crowd and aided the woman who was floating between consciousness and coma. On that day, it was the woman in despair and the nurse so determined to save her that stayed with me. Two faces I will not forget.

I was in Northern Israel, as Hezbollah rockets rained down indiscriminately on small towns and villages. There was a doctor, whose task it was to shop for organs among family members who had just died. One Israeli man immediately said yes, saying his late brother would have wanted this. The doctor harvested the dead man's eyes, and placed them in a patient who happened to be Arab. After the surgery, the Arab embraced the grieving Israeli brother and thanked him for the gift of sight. Two faces I will remember always.

And this year, as the economy upends so many Americans, a seventeen-year-old boy named Chris invited me to his family's Los Angeles apartment. His parents could no longer afford the rent. As the teenager revealed an empty refrigerator, Chris assured me it wouldn't always be like this, "after the storm, the sun always comes out." He's right. Sunshine follows every storm. His is another face that sticks with me.

Each of these faces tested by challenge offer so much hope. What photographer Michael Clinton captures in American Portraits is the expectation that an uncertain future in one's homeland could be improved upon here. Individual spirit and determination could shape an entire family's fate.

Clinton tells the story of Linda Jackson. Several generations of her family came to America from Sierra Leone. They were transplanted African slaves who married both Cherokee and Shinnecock Indians first living in South Carolina. Imagine then the rich journey that brought them to Brooklyn, New York.

Clinton photographed Tamara Levinson, whose maternal grandparents fled Nazi Germany for Argentina, and whose parents landed in America when Tamara was six years old. They hoped to provide for their daughter the American dream about which they heard so much. Levinson would later represent the United States in gymnastics in the1992 Olympic Games. Seventeen years later, Clinton's photograph perfectly captures an American who proudly displays her individual spirit with tattoos and a tank top.

There is Tiffany Bui Rothman, whose pregnant mother escaped Saigon as it fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975. Rothman describes to Clinton the journey she and her two siblings took before calling a refugee camp in Arkansas home.

And there's Debra Shriver, whose forefather, an English farmer, came to Virginia in 1657, three hundred years before she was born. Generations of her family ultimately landed in Alabama where she was raised. Her ancestors fought in the Civil War and later in the battle for civil rights from the African-American neighborhoods of southern Alabama. We learn of her story in the same year this country inaugurated its first African-American president.

With every photograph, Clinton reveals a different portrait of the American dream, each with its own travails and triumphs, each with a journey motivated by hope for a better life for the generations that will follow.

Michael Clinton confessed he considered the inclusion of celebrities in this book, but ultimately decided against it, believing every one of these ninety-three faces deserved their own moment to shine. Their mile-wide smiles and their journeys that span even further, will leave their mark on you long past the final page.

David Muir
ABC News
New York