Need Your Help With Expat Photography Dream Assignment

Hi all, I'm an American expat who splits her time between Italy and France. My dream assignment is to document the expatriate experience worldwide, using real-life expats to reimagine historical paintings, iconic photographs and famous literary passages depicting travel and expat life.

And you can help!

I'm in the running for this assignment, and I've broken the Top 100 list - but I want to get as many votes as possible, so that my proposal gets into the Top 10 and moves onto the judged panel.

Voting ends April 3, so please - I’m begging you - go and vote NOW! Then, copy and paste the link to an email or Twitter/blog post and harass everyone you know to place their vote, too!

http://www.nameyourdreamassignment.com/ … xperience/

My proposal, which is on the above link, is as follows:

Ernest Hemingway. Peggy Guggenheim. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Jackie Onassis. Josephine Baker. Jim Morrison. Gertrude Stein. Pablo Picasso. Madonna and Johnny Depp! These are the famous faces of expatriation, and their stories read like legends; but there are millions around the world, from every walk of life, who currently call another country home.

Who are they? What are their lives like? What inspired them to live in a land far from friends, family and familiar surroundings? My dream assignment is to discover the answers to these and many other questions people have about the expatriate experience.

Some may ask, why not write a book? As an American expat who splits her time between Rome and the South of France, I find that I’m able to explain my own experience more fully, and more realistically, through photography.

Take that phrase, for example - “an American expat who splits her time between Rome and the South of France.” Doesn’t my life sound glamorous? Do you imagine me sipping Champagne on Mediterranean beaches all day long? Well, to be honest, I have done that once or twice. But the photographs I take reveal a daily routine much like yours - I’m just choosing to do it in places other than New Jersey, where my legal residence, bank account and childhood memories reside; or New York, where I was a fast-talking, bagel-eating grown-up for 14 years.

So, the $50,000 question remains: How will I carry out my Dream Assignment?

I plan to research historical paintings, iconic photographs and famous literary passages depicting travel and expat life in a wide variety of locations worldwide. (From my preliminary research, there should be about 10 cities on four continents on my final list.) Then I will travel to those places, meet with expats, and tell their stories in words and pictures on the Dream Assignment blog. The expats I meet will then become the subjects of my main photography project, modern-day reimaginings of the expat-focused art research.

My own expatriate experience has inspired me not only to photograph expats in their habitats (natural or otherwise), but to do so in a way that brings the true expat experience to light in the hopes that it will inspire others to follow their dreams all the way to the arrivals gate at their destination.