The Good Citizen

The Good Citizen explores how American society came to be what it is today.

Over a period of eight years, photographer Benjamin Rasmussen travelled to 43 states and was introduced to over 500 people as he investigated the impact of the country’s complex history on contemporary society. In this new book, Rasmussen’s photographs are combined with essays by Frank Wu­ and collectively they seek to provoke thought and conversation around the complicated nature of American identity.

"Who was freely invited into this space and who wasn’t? In what ways are the ripples of our past seen in our present? How can we engage more honestly with our history?’"—Benjamin Rasmussen

Benjamin Rasmussen is a Faroese/American photographer who grew up in the Philippines and moved to the United States as an adult. The Good Citizen work grew out of his journey to try and understand his own American identity. Over the past decade and a half his work has appeared within the pages of publications from Time to National Geographic to Vanity Fair and has been exhibited widely. Rasmussen’s collaborator on this project is renowned legal scholar Frank H. Wu. In 2020, Wu was appointed as President of Queens College of the City University of New York. He was a professor of law at Howard University Law School for a decade and during that time wrote Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White.