The Party Is Over

I got my start as a photographer in 1991, as a freelancer working mostly for newspapers and magazines. In 2001 I joined the paper I grew up with, Canada’s The Globe and Mail. I then worked freelance and moved to Washington, DC, from Toronto in 2007, at which point I began covering American domestic and foreign policy. I covered the war in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2010 and made multiple reporting trips to Guantanamo Bay. I covered the US–Mexico border from 2011 to 2013 and captured the devastation of the war in Ukraine. But whenever I returned home to DC, my world of images was dominated by politics. Photographers I got to know early on, veterans like Scott Applewhite, Bill Clark, Stephen Crowley, and Melina Mara, were invaluable mentors. Washington is where my training as a political photographer began and continues, on the front lines of American democracy.

After years of covering Congress and the White House, what became clear to me was just how intertwined politics has been with visual strategy, how crafted the visual message can be. Much of the everyday reality of political life is overlooked because it feels too far removed from the headlines. But it was on the fringes of press events, out of view of the television cameras, out of the frame of photo ops that I was taught to dig for images that could offer some comment or critique on what was actually happening in politics. Sometimes this means looking for a spot where no one else wants to be, a counterintuitive position among the scrum of reporters. I recall a cocktail reception being held in a room near the chamber for the House of Representatives, where the catering staff had set up a table for drinks in Statuary Hall. On the table were bottles of wine, a few empty cocktail glasses; next to that, a statue of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, memorialized as an ordinary part of the scenery, blending the violence of that history into the background of everyday political life.

While my role here is to witness and record history, I’ve had a hard time comprehending what I’ve witnessed, if only for the sheer scale of what has unfolded in such a brief period of time. 

Since embarking on this project in 2019, I’ve covered three impeachments, a global pandemic, the end of Roe v. Wade, an insurrection, and a shocking dystopian press conference (of so many) where government officials justified the murder of American citizens in Minnesota at the hands of paramilitarized ICE officers. I’ve watched a reality television personality become one of the most destructive presidents we’ve ever had.

And yet, after all these years of working in and living in the strange, often dispiriting trenches of American politics, I naturalized and became an American citizen in 2025, nearly one year before those jets flew over us on that hot summer day. Many people have asked why I would do such a thing, given how ugly things have become in the United States. My answer never changes: I wanted to be an American citizen because of the photographers who inspired me to follow in the tradition of documentary work—namely, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks. 

This country’s complicated and imperfect past is unavoidable. What’s more, not since we were a collection of British colonies have we been this close to living under authoritarian rule. But my narrative was shaped by a time when Americans were defined by their valor, compassion, and sense of fairness and when their country’s heroic reputation preceded them. During World War II, my parents’ region of Veneto in Northern Italy fell under Nazi control. Italian partisans turned the occupation into a guerrilla war that led to cruel forms of retribution against civilians. The Allies and partisans, led by American forces, defeated the fascists and liberated my parents; my father would speak vividly about meeting an American soldier as a child and being awestruck by him. Furthermore, my wife’s Jewish grandparents landed in the United States seeking refuge from their native Germany as it was transformed by the Third Reich.

During Donald Trump’s second inauguration, in January 2025, I was walking by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with my mentor, Ken Light, who photographed college protests as a student during the Vietnam War. Light lamented the possibility that the progress he and his friends fought for in the 1960s and ’70s, particularly for civil rights, could be rolled back by this administration. He had no idea how prescient he was. There’s been no shortage of Republicans using Nazi messaging and imagery, emboldened and normalized by Trump’s wing of the GOP. As recently as this past September, Ohio Republican Senator Jon Husted’s campaign political director, Stephen Woytek, was fired after it had been discovered that he’d posted Nazi-related content on his social media account.

It certainly feels as if the fascism my parents experienced has been making a comeback, not just here in the US, but globally. Given the lessons of history—and especially when I consider my family’s history—it can be easy to despair over where things seem to be headed. Those historical nightmares are all preserved by the art I practice, as are the signs of what’s to come. But photography can also point to forms of resistance. Lange’s work in particular helps keep my head on straight, especially her iconic photograph from the Great Depression of a battered little gas station where someone had posted a sign under the air pump: this is your country don’t let the big men take it away from you.