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For seven years, American photographer Andrew Moisey had an all-access pass to photograph Greek life inside a prominent national fraternity house where his brother was a member. One day, Moisey stumbled upon a wax-stained, sixty-year-old ritual manual abandoned on the floor. The idea for an “iIlustrated manual” was born. Moisey scanned the manual pages and then digitally inserted his contemporary pictures in them so that they appeared next to the old imagery and texts.

The resulting pages are published in The American Fraternity, (Daylight Books, October 2018), the first photo book to expose the dark, two-century-old world of fraternities. Moisey’s photographs contrast the high-minded constitution of the fraternity with its often underlying violent, misogynistic reality. Moisey writes: “As you turn the pages, you will marvel at the rituals, initiation ceremonies, historic texts, and the candid, often disturbing photographs. You will begin to understand why the college fraternity is not a passing phase, but the historical fountain of leadership for a hubristic, chauvinistic, male pleasure fortress — the modern United States”.

Many of the young men depicted in The American Fraternity are the future leaders of American institutions and families. Moisey’s photographs help us understand why forty percent of American college students cast their only vote, in the year 2016, for Donald Trump. At the end of the book, Moisey lists prominent Americans in both the public and private sector who are or were in college fraternities.