Daria Addabbo
This Hard Land
Springsteen’s songs have been a compass for me—they taught me how to navigate the American landscape. He inspired my interpretations and shots, drawing dreams like no other. His songs are filled with stories and characters, abundant with names, places, atmosphere, and emotion—exactly what we strive to capture as photographers. Although he never uses the first person, his personality shines through in his watermark, just as it does in our work. The visual details in his songs are so rich that one might even say Springsteen is a photographer in his own right. Work is a central theme in his lyrics: his characters, hailing from the unskilled service sectors of suburban and sprawling urban America, struggle to climb the social ladder—embodying the American Dream, the hope that the next generation will live better lives than their parents, a promise that has proven to be painfully broken. Springsteen's narratives unfold in everyday settings—car washes, auto repair shops, supermarkets, laundromats, diners, factories—and also in homes at night, in cramped spaces, and in the vast, gray sprawl of urban parking lots, with the night itself becoming a path to escape. As in the lives of those portrayed in this project, this dream often remains elusive, and this work attempts to read contemporary reality, during Trump’s 2025 inauguration, through the tools provided by Springsteen.
