© Kitra Cahana
This is the nomadic dream, a different kind of American dream lived by young hobos, travellers, hitchhikers, vagrants and tramps.
Kitra Cahana (@kitracahana) is an award-winning documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work blends social, anthropological and spiritual inquiry. With degrees in philosophy and visual anthropology, she is recognised for her sensitive, deeply human storytelling. Cahana grew up with a deep sense of curiosity, spiritual grounding and comfort in constant movement. Drawn to escaping rigidity and exploring different ways of life, she embraced photojournalism as a means to stay mobile and probe social and political questions.
In an era when constant travel is often conflated with genuine freedom, and frequent-flier miles are viewed as markers of personal growth, Kitra Cahana reminds us that the meaning of movement is far older and far more radical than our modern conveniences suggest.
Her long-term series, Nomadic America, is far more than a visual inventory of young travellers hopping freight trains or hitching their way across the country. It is a meditation on what becomes visible when people step outside the gravitational pull of mainstream society. Cahana's camera renders this departure not as spectacle, but as a form of inquiry: What does it mean, in contemporary America, to live a life unanchored?
Cahana is uniquely equipped to pose that question. Her childhood, shaped by deliberate de-centring from consumeristic norms and extremist political views, instilled in her the idea that home is not a fixed place but a way of moving through the world with curiosity as one's guide. This sensibility permeates Nomadic America. The work isn't driven by voyeurism; it is guided by recognition. Cahana approaches her subjects not as a detached observer, but as someone already fluent in the emotional rhythms of a life in motion.
Her subjects occupy an ambiguous space in the American imagination. Celebrated by some as modern inheritors of the romantic hobo myth and condemned by others as vagrants, these travellers reveal America's unresolved tension between personal freedom and societal control. Cahana's images refuse both clichés. Her photographs insist on complexity, revealing a culture that is at once resourceful, fragile, inventive and deeply human.
What happens when the systems designed to protect people fail to do so? Many of Cahana's subjects arrive on the road through choice, rejecting capitalist rigour, for freedom or ideological reasons. Others arrive due to trauma or lack of options. In this mixed company, the road becomes a liminal zone where people rewrite the terms of their own narratives. The community is decentralised, diverse and continually shifting.
In contemporary America, characterised by pronounced economic inequality, systemic precarity and the pervasive pressures of consumer culture, it is readily understandable why some might disengage from conventional societal expectations. Seen in this light, the itinerant lives depicted in Nomadic America appear less extreme and more a thoughtful response to a society that often feels misaligned with personal values. Cahana's subjects offer instructive insights into resilience, autonomy and the pursuit of meaning outside the dominant frameworks of work, consumption and belonging.
Many of the young nomads embrace life untethered from conventional society, sometimes guided by anti-capitalist or anarchist principles. To extend this further, one might view a life on the road as a solid political stance; an intentional refusal of the systems that have failed them and a reimagining of autonomy, community and survival outside traditional structures.
Cahana's photographs operate as a counter-archive to policies that criminalise nomadic bodies and homelessness. Against this backdrop, Nomadic America becomes an act of cultural memory, documenting lives that official systems often overlook.
Life on the road can be magical, but also harsh, marked by exposure, instability, addiction and loneliness. Still, travellers rely on mutual aid and shared survival strategies. Cahana's work sits at the intersection of journalism and ethnography. She is transparent about her role as a documentarian but also forms deep bonds with the people she travels with.
To me, the story is about that light and dark.
The most compelling aspect of the series is the intimacy behind it. Cahana presents the lives of contemporary nomads candidly, without embellishment. She carries a dual fidelity: the journalist's duty to accuracy and the anthropologist's desire for immersion. This approach allows her to translate the travellers' world without flattening it. Her images feel lived, not merely observed.
The choice to photograph Nomadic America in colour does more than capture visual beauty; it brings the lives of her subjects vividly into the present. Every hue helps convey the material, emotional and social realities of life on the road. By preserving these details, her images function as both intimate portraits and ethnographic records, allowing viewers to experience the nomadic world as fully lived, immediate and profoundly human. Cahana's images are quietly stunning, not because they idealise life on the road, but because they look at it with dignity and care.
The series is not a symbol of escape so much as a reminder that alternative ways of inhabiting the world exist and that they often emerge precisely where society stops looking. Cahana is currently hoping to create a monograph of the archive of Nomadic America, ensuring these images and stories reach a wider audience and endure as a record of this hidden subculture. Through her work, the road becomes not only a physical geography but a philosophical terrain where questions of belonging, freedom, legality and identity are negotiated with every step.
In a country that fabricates independence, Cahana's project offers a gentle provocation. It asks us to reconsider the value of lives lived at the margins. In their improvisations and vulnerabilities, the nomads in her photographs reveal something essential about America itself: a nation poised between the promise of mobility and the security of stability, still uncertain which offers true belonging.
I get so emotionally charged by the hope that is inherent within a beautiful image.
