Chris Arnade is a complicated man. In 2011, after working for eighteen years as a Wall Street bond trader and making enough to live with his family in a large, upscale apartment in Brooklyn, he decided to visit the Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx because he “was told not to.” His fellow strivers had warned him of drugs, prostitutes, and poverty, but because he “wasn’t in the mood for listening to anyone,” he decided to visit anyway.

Camera in hand, Arnade started making lengthier trips, exploring parts of New York he’d never seen himself and taking photographs of people he met. He chose to go on foot, his only goal getting back to that Brooklyn apartment at the end of the night, and allowed the suggestions he received along the way to inform his ad hoc itinerary.

What these trips began to teach him was “just how cloistered and privileged my world was and how narrow and selfish I was.” He decided to start pulling out the insulation that fellow bond trader Sherman McCoy prizes in Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities, and to go in search of the Americans his well-heeled colleagues had many opinions about but rarely encountered.

So began a career in photojournalism that would see Arnade’s essays and pictures regularly published in the Guardian while traditional reporters at places like the New York Times tweeted accusations of lapses in journalistic ethics. (Formally trained photojournalists would never offer assistance to their subjects, just as they would never offer to pay their subjects in order to take their photographs.)

Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America is the upshot of Arnade’s career so far. Eight years of pictures and written reflections have fed into a glossy hardback book, its 300 pages divided into alternating photo essays and meditations, thematically arranged.

The framework Arnade develops after his first forays into Hunts Point is simple. He and his colleagues and peers represent the “front row,” those who escaped their hometowns through academic achievement and credentialing in order to be received into the warm arms of the meritocracy. (Arnade has a PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins, exactly the sort of quantitative background most useful for becoming a high-stakes gambler with the treasure and savings of others on Wall Street.)

Those who aren’t well suited to the academia-credentialing complex remain in the hometowns the front-row kids abandon, and make do on scraps from the meritocratic table. Where they once found handy employment on the factory floor within days of graduating high school, they’re now left with the aftermath of economic stratagems employed by the front row to “improve efficiency” and “grow the economy.”

That is to say, they live in the left-behind places: depressed post-industrial towns, cities full of boarded-up storefronts and drug traps, neighborhoods full of tangled lawns and chunked-up sidewalks where the commercial withdrawal of crushable OxyContin has led to a flood of heroin, and heroin overdoses.

Arnade walks the streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of Gary, Indiana, and Bakersfield, California, taking barometric readings of our nation’s spiritual atmosphere. Where industries have collapsed or moved, taking blue-collar jobs with them across national borders, he finds people who feel confusion, discouragement, and, occasionally, outright hopelessness.

Outside the gravitational reach of New York City, Arnade finds an America that obeys different laws than those that govern front row life. For one, the people he meets consistently express a desire to stay local, their dim prospects for good local work notwithstanding. In having a stable notion of home in an age of “where are you based?” they challenge a core front-row assumption about how one ought to approach life.

Staying has its costs.

Staying has its costs. An interviewee named Ruben in Gary, Indiana, says, “You got to leave Gary now for work. … Back in my day you needed a strong back and a weak mind to get a job. Now you need a weak back and a strong mind.” With work for strong backs evaporating, those who would have made a life out of respectable labor in better days find their way into illegal economies, selling drugs or running guns.

It’s hard to blame them. The legal options for work are outrageous, in some cases outright offensive to human dignity. One scenario feels as though it could have come from the pages of a Don DeLillo novel: in Selma, Alabama, cotton warehouses said to predate the Civil War are crumbling into rubble. Day laborers can go to the site, pull bricks out of the piles, chip off the mortar, and stack them for $10 to $20 a skid. The bricks are then sold for a dollar each to restaurants and businesses that use them to create a sense of “historical charm.”

Says one of the men toiling in the piles, “This is slave work.” He has wrapped his bleeding hands in cloth. “That is Selma for you, though: still a city full of slaves.” The affront to Selma’s image in the American historical imagination is palpable. Arnade describes it as one of the worst-off places he visited.

One of the ethnographic insights Arnade picks up during his travels concerns McDonald’s, which has taken the role of the missing “third place” in back row American culture (after the first and second places of home and work). McDonald’s is the public where many of his subjects go to get out of the heat or cold, to see friends and spend time without needing to endure a sermon – the traditional sort one might hear in church, or the secular variant one might be subjected to in the office of a nonprofit.

The lack of judgment or moralism at McDonald’s, each franchise so plainly available to meet a variety of needs, is a major draw for Arnade’s subjects. Many of them were told in school they were dumb. Then, too, Arnade confesses that he and his upper-crust peers looked down on the religiosity of the back row. He finds vibrant belief throughout his travels, including in the life of a trans woman and addict whose difficult dinner with her conservative mother Arnade facilitates.

These varieties of rejection contribute to an overall feeling of depression among the back row, and it is this condition – more so than its interlocking material and cultural causes – that Arnade takes to be important in his book. “It isn’t just about money,” he writes. “These entire communities are stigmatized socially and culturally.”

By the book’s end, he has seen enough to have reached a conclusion about what needs to happen to guarantee the future of American society and the health of our democracy. “We all need to listen to each other more,” he writes, because “our nation’s problems and differences are just too big, too structural, and too deep to be solved by legislation and policy out of Washington.”