Aug 25, 2025
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What a Decade of Photos Reveals About America’s Shared Humanity

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It starts with a slow climb. One foot, then the next. The path to Stone Mountain’s summit is worn smooth by generations—some seeking silence, others celebration. But what waits at the top is more than a view.

For ten years, Jean Shifrin returned to this granite giant with only a phone in hand and an eye for stillness. What she captured wasn’t grandeur or spectacle, but the quiet rhythm of people coming together. Her book, Rise Above, reveals a portrait of America not through headlines, but through humanity.

A father holding his daughter high above the skyline. A monk smiling at the breeze. Strangers sharing laughter. Families lost in thought. These aren’t staged moments—they’re real, fleeting, and profoundly telling.

In these photographs, taken over a decade atop Georgia’s most iconic stone, something rare comes into focus: the soft, collective hum of who we are when no one’s watching.

A Summit Where Everyone Meets

Stone Mountain has long been known for its size and its scars. Once a symbol of Confederate memory, it remains etched with the faces of Civil War generals. But today, as Shifrin’s photos reveal, the summit tells a different story. It’s where a woman in a niqab prays beside a Buddhist monk in orange robes. Where firefighters climb in tribute and children leap across stones in playful wonder. Where families pose, musicians perform, and veterans mourn often in the same hour.

This, perhaps, is the truest image of America: diverse, resilient, and human.

Across seasons and celebrations, Shifrin captured the mountain’s rhythm. Not just its foot traffic, but its heartbeat. Her images show birthdays, yoga poses, kite-flying, and solemn solitude. They’re not choreographed moments, but natural encounters—proof that community doesn’t always have to be loud to be powerful.

The Language of Connection

The feelings and emotions unite these photos, not their styles or techniques. Whether it’s a child balanced on her father’s shoulders, or a man quietly reading beneath storm-heavy skies, each image holds space for the universal hope, reflection, love, and longing.

Shifrin’s camera, like her perspective, is unobtrusive. She doesn’t direct or intrude. She observes. She waits. And in that patience, she finds what so many miss: the gestures and glances that tell us who we really are.

An American Mosaic

The strength of Rise Above lies not in grandeur but in accumulation. One image might be easy to overlook. A moment in passing. But ten years’ worth of moments—hundreds of strangers bound by the same climb, the same light, the same open air form something far greater.

She reminds us that America’s story doesn’t live in monuments alone. It lives in the space between strangers, in shared rituals, and in the collective act of showing up—again and again—for something larger than ourselves.

Looking Forward, Together

What does a decade of photos from the top of a rock really tell us?

That unity isn’t always loud. That belonging isn’t always planned. That hope is still found where we move side by side, even in silence.

Jean Shifrin’s work doesn’t promise a perfect country. It offers something far more grounded, a glimpse of what it looks like when we show up for each other, without armor or agenda. Just people, meeting the sky. Meeting stone. Meeting one another.

And in that, perhaps, we rediscover a kind of quiet truth: Humanity is shared—not because we are the same, but because we rise together.

Grab the book now. 

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