The Fortieth Parallel

The 40th parallel roughly bisects the United States, stretching from the New Jersey shore to Northern California. For this project, I photographed the view from the intersection of this latitude with each whole degree of longitude across the country. This panoramic series explores our human desire to create systems and locate ourselves within them, uniting the histories of American mapping, landscape photography, and locative technologies like GPS.

The idea originated in 1991 while I was living in Boulder, Colorado. Looking east from Flagstaff Mountain, I noticed Baseline Road stretching in a perfectly straight line across the plains. A friend explained that it followed the 40th latitude—the baseline surveyed in 1855 to create the townships and homesteads critical to western settlement. I realized then that I wanted to document these arbitrary points of human measurement and the landscapes found at their intersections.

I began photographing in 1998, just as civilian GPS units became accessible. The space between each confluence is about 53 miles, resulting in 50 terrestrial points and two coastal points for a total of 52 images. At each specific intersection, I have a roughly 20-square-foot area to set up my camera and compose a view of whatever scene lies before me.

What you don’t see in these pictures is the invisible weight of history and the mechanics of displacement. In the 1760s, this parallel necessitated the Mason-Dixon line, and a century later, Clarence King and photographer Timothy O’Sullivan surveyed it to map routes for western expansion. These surveys were not just neutral scientific exercises; they were the blueprints for settler-colonialism and the systematic taking of land from Indigenous peoples. While historical mapping was once a tool for commerce and territorial control, we now rely on GPS to find our way, often missing the broader picture of how this land was divided. By highlighting these invisible markers, I hope to prompt viewers to consider the legacy of landscape photography and their own relationship to a place defined by both beauty and dispossession.

I photographed this series using an 8x10 Deardorff camera, similar to those used in the earliest surveys of the West. To emulate a person’s field of vision, I created panoramas by exposing three individual frames of Ektachrome color transparency film, pivoting the camera to capture the full sweep of the horizon. I chose to leave the frame edges intact to acknowledge the process and the physical nature of the film. Kodak’s discontinuation of Ektachrome in 2012 created a narrow window to finish the project, and these final triptychs ultimately unite the historical form of the landscape survey with contemporary photographic practice.