»Civil War hero and America’s 18th President Ulysses S. Grant opened his 1885 memoir by writing, “My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.” I, too, am American but I retraced those branches back to Europe by moving to France in November 2016.

“Dreams from America” represents a catalogue of images from the earliest nude photograph that I took in Maine in 1980 through leaving America in 2016. In between those bookends, I was a photojournalist and then a civil rights and Constitutional litigator. Most of these images are from around 2008-2016, a time of heady optimism in the United States. It was a time of expanding inclusivity, freedom and possibilities and when I sought beauty after leaving the practice of law.

My camera and curiosity took me from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Hawaii, Kentucky, Virginia and New York. But mostly- California. Los Angeles, Malibu, Joshua Tree, San Francisco. These are the stories of the women I met along the way.«
—Renée Jacobs