Living in the Shadow of an American Election

A feeling of impending doom hovers over many of Nasseri’s pictures. On the first day of the road trip, which happened to fall on the Fourth of July, Nasseri and a friend arrived in Bishop, California, a small city in the Eastern Sierra. “We first went to a watermelon-eating contest, real American small-town stuff, and then we found these springs in the middle of the mountains,” Nasseri told me. “It was absolutely stunning, and everyone was just hanging out, blasting music, drinking beers, in good spirits.” One image in the series captures the deep release of the springs: a young woman in the water with her back to the camera, her hair wet and slick down her back, while her male companion dunks his head back, only his face visible, upturned to the sky above. But if in one moment all was calm, in the next everything changed. “All of a sudden, I’m not sure what precipitated it, but this giant brawl broke out,” Nasseri said. “Punches were flying, women were pulling each other’s hair, dust everywhere, a couple of people were lying bloodied on the ground. The party was over.” In another image, taken after the fight broke out, two young men appear to hold back a third one, who is facing the camera, staring blankly ahead. We can’t tell what he’s looking at, but we can be pretty sure that it’s nothing good. In a photograph taken later in the trip, in Nashville, on the way back from the R.N.C., we see a group of neo-Nazis handing out flyers in broad daylight. “When I captured that, I realized that extremism never went away,” Nasseri told me. “It was there, simmering all along.”