If a face can launch a thousand ships, can a thousand faces launch an RV?

If the RV in question belongs to portrait photographer Christine Hauber, then the answer is yes. For two years Hauber has been living and working in a custom built darkroom on wheels, roaming the highways and byways of the 50 states in search of the faces of working America.

Hauber's life started out on a very different track. She earned her a degree in psychology, but it didn't take her long to figure out that the profession wasn't where she wanted to be. So, in her mid twenties, Hauber decided to pursue her longtime interest in the fine arts and studied architecture and studio photography. After graduation, she started taking photos of people, and she ended up spending 1996 to 2001 as a successful portrait photographer in Denver. But Hauber found herself spending long hours drumming up customers and trying to get paid rather than advancing her art. "I spent a lot of time doing marketing, advertising and bookkeeping," she explains, and although she was earning a living in a creative field, she still wasn't creatively satisfied.

In 1996, Hauber starting giving more serious thought to an idea she'd been considering since art school. She'd spent a good deal of time journeying through Europe and Asia, but she'd never done much traveling in her native country. "There were beautiful parts of America that I'd never seen," she says. It also seemed a shame that so many great photographers spent their time capturing images of people in other nations, but nobody was doing the same for the working men and women of the United States. Hauber decided that she would embark on a project to "capture who we are as American people."

With excitement outweighing fear, Hauber traded her permanent residence for a small RV with a complete darkroom in back and said goodbye to the lion's share of her material possessions. After numerous attempts to convince deep-pocketed corporate sponsors to buy ad space on the side of her RV, she turned to her dad, her dad's boss and her own credit cards to finance the journey.

In 2001, she packed up her medium-format Bronica camera and hit the road with her dog Gracie and her cat Ansel Adams."I had to come up with a project that was sellable," she remembers. First dubbed simply "The American Project" and now called "Working in the U.S.A.," Hauber, now in her mid-thirties, plans to visit all 50 states, taking portraits of everyday Americans in their places of work. Her goal is to sell the photos to published as a large format book.

When she rolls into a new city or town, Hauber begins looking for people whose jobs are somehow representative of their states. She's gotten to know lobstermen in Maine, shrimp fishermen on the Gulf Coast and farmers and ranchers in Texas. When she introduces herself and explains her work, people are instantly attracted to the idea and almost always agree to pose. Hauber takes care to place her subjects in their working settings so that the images' backgrounds offer as much to the viewer as the people. "I like to turn a portrait into something that is beautiful, and that also tells a little bit of a story," she says. And she believes that the stories her black-and-white portraits tell are important ones. "I've learned that there are so many warm, friendly hardworking people in America, and that they aren't all materialistic. They look out for each other and have a love for their neighbors." She feels that this message isn't being conveyed in the mainstream media, and hopes that "Working in the U.S.A." will change some minds.

Two years into the project, Hauber is once again thinking about the business end of photography even as she fulfils her creative needs. "I have an agent now, and I have to market myself." So she has set up a Web site (www.hauberphotographics.com), although her passion for photography is far more important to her than any potential financial gain. "If someone offered me a million dollars to give up my camera and throw away the negatives from this project, I wouldn't take it," she says. "I'd rather be poor and happy than rich and unfulfilled." Hauber hopes at least to break even once the book is published, but her chief goal is to gain the sort of name recognition that will make future projects easier to get off the ground.

With more than 30 states behind her, Hauber is well on the road towards completing her journey and is already considering following up with a project about American children. But for the time being she's still out there, looking for the faces that tell the stories of working America.