It’s been said that no one can love you more than your grandmother. Certainly, the bonds between a grandmother and grandchild are often unlike any other relationship and can last a lifetime. For 2 young photographers, bound by their love of their own grandmothers and in search of a meaningful photo project, that love and admiration became the impetus for a 5-year photography journey across all 50 states, as they photographed and conversed with a wide and diverse range of American grandmothers. The result? The beautiful and limited edition new photography book, Grandmothers Across America.

Without a definitive strategy to find willing participants, photographers John Mark Hanson and Joey Schultz set off to interview and photograph grandmothers across the country (literally ringing random doorbells and inquiring if a grandmother lived at the house). Gradually building a rapport and trust with the older women they met, they would ask each of them if they had wisdom they would now share with their younger selves if only they could. The responses were as wise and diverse as the socioeconomic and racial backgrounds of the women, and the two photographers came away with some insights applicable to all the women they met: “There’s beauty in aging and beauty in diversity” and as a whole, among all the women they interviewed, there was unity in the joy, suffering and profound resilience of what the photographers call, “the collective American matriarchy.” Using a Kickstarter campaign to help fund this project, the result is a gorgeous book of photos of over 260 grandmothers and includes wise words from these older women who have lived to see it all. As the authors make clear, this is a book of “portraits of the women who raised a nation.”

The book is available for purchase on the project’s website, and you can see many of the grandmother photographs on social media, both on Instagram and Facebook. To hear the photographers describe their work in their own words, you can listen to a recent public radio interview with them here, or watch them interviewed on television here. The photos in their book, and their words, are touching, poignant, intimate, and heartfelt- all the attributes you can imagine were present in their relationships with their own grandmothers. As these two gifted artists write in the dedication of their website, “The main inspiration for this project is the gratitude and love we both share for our own grandmothers. We see the power and importance of their wisdom and want to share it on a larger scale for younger generations.” And we’re all fortunate to be the recipients of the generosity and wisdom shared by the women profiled in this beautiful book.