An unnerving portrait of the USA’s fractured society

A new photobook explores America’s increasing inequality, division and toxic culture wars in a historic election year.

In February, photographer Michael Dressel went to a Trump rally, not knowing what to expect. As the race for the Republican Party presidential primaries had reached crunch time, it was becoming increasingly clear that the former president would win the race to challenge for another term at the presidential elections later this year, and thousands of people had gathered to hear him speak.

But in the unshaded, 35 degree celsius plus heat, Dressel was in disbelief at what he was witnessing, and after waiting for five hours before Trump’s speech began, he turned to some fans next to him and said: “This is pretty shitty how it’s organised, I hope his presidency is better than that.”

“No, no, no,” they replied. “We couldn’t get a better venue because the Democrats own all the big venues and they’re sabotaging Trump’s campaign.”

When Trump eventually started, it didn’t get any better. “It was pretty scary,” Dressel recalls. “I went because I thought ‘I want to see this guy’ – you see him on TV and you think it’s complete gibberish, so I thought that he must have some charisma, otherwise people wouldn’t be that fanatically excited. And then I went there and I saw him and heard him speak, you know what? It is gibberish and there’s no charisma.”

It was those fanatics, rather than the man himself, that ended up piquing Dressel’s lens. A picture that he took that day, featuring a man wearing a plastic Donald Trump mask, a Trump sweater and a MAGA hat is featured in his new photobook The End is Near, Here. Comprised of work created across the USA over the course of the past six years, the book’s black-and-white images explore the country’s increasingly fractured society, stark inequality and toxic culture wars.

Dressel himself was born into a divided society, having grown up in communist East Berlin, which was physically walled off from the western half of the city. Despite the decades, miles and ostensible ideologies apart, he sees similarities between the two societies. “In East Germany, the official propaganda was that everything is great and that we were marching towards the perfect society, but in reality things were not that great,” he says. “Here, you have an official image that the media projects – it’s what Hollywood produces and that’s not what society looks like when you’re stepping out on the street. Photographing Hollywood and what it looks like, you see decay and poverty.”

Since moving nearly four decades ago, he’s seen American society’s fissures grow increasingly wider. “I do feel that polarisation has progressed because economically, things are splitting further and further apart,” he says. “The rich get really rich and the middle class is shrinking – globalisation has worked great for huge corporations, but it hasn’t worked really well for the workers of Western Europe and the US.”

The photographs are surreal and striking, but simultaneously unnerving, ranging from people grinning as they hold huge rifles to barren landscapes marked only with decaying fragments of human society – a broken fence, or a disused building marked with an ‘X’ over its door. Religious symbols and Make America Great Again are recurrent themes, though Dressel believes that the man who brought the slogan to a worldwide audience is just a symptom of a sickly society, rather than the cause.

“There is a reality behind this populism – since the rise of globalisation, the standard of living for workers in the US and western Europe has been sinking, and they have to work harder for less and less,” he says. “And during that whole time, you had governments and parties in power promising that this time, things are going to get better. It never happened, and people are fed up and are saying ‘no, this doesn’t work for us anymore, we need people who will blow this thing up.’ Trump is literally that bomb.”

It’s not a point without merit — just 800 billionaires in the USA hold more wealth than lower-earning half of the American population. The irony, of course, being that Trump is in the former, rather than the latter category.

“This cannot go on much longer, the way we are living now – something has to give” he continues. “But nobody knows what that is and that creates a lot of instability and insecurity.”