During my trip to the US in 2023, I took a fair number of pictures—though now I’m thinking I should’ve taken ten times as many. A year later, with more skill and experience from my first photography course and photo series, I revisited those images and put together a photo essay on the vastness of America, inevitably marked by traces of human presence.

Like many foreign travelers to the US, I often couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in a movie. To enhance the cinematic quality of the photos, I cropped them to a 16:9 ratio.