Images from 1982 to 2012 that capture the everyday scenes within ceremony in American society: picnics and public events from San Francisco to Arizona, a visual narrative both distant and intimate in its encounters and familiarity. Within the comfort of the crowd the pictures celebrate everything that makes the people photographed at once similar and vastly unique. In the afterword Tom Finke lists America as the Fourth of July and Labor Day, picnics, parades and county fairs; skyscrapers and small towns; baseball and jazz, poetry and rodeos, pancakes, hot dogs and popcorn; summer storms and lightning bugs, crisp autumns and winter blizzards; every kind of landscape from mountains to deserts, farms to seacoasts. All of us, he adds, are signalling to one another all the time, both deliberately and involuntarily, and his photographs are just another part of the constant ritual of communication. All text is in Japanese and English.