The 40th parallel traverses the United States. Starting on the coast of New Jersey, it travels through the suburbs of Philadelphia, across the farm lands and urban centers of Ohio, marks the border between Kansas and Nebraska, spans the mountains of Colorado and the high desert of Utah and Nevada, and finally reaches the sea on the Northern California coast. There are 50 lines of longitude that cross the 40th on land plus two coastal points for a total of 52 intersections.
My earliest memory of an understanding of “Place” was when I was about 6 years old, and my father and I were out on a drive, as we often did. I am not sure where we were going or what we were doing, but I remember he said “here comes the 42nd latitude,” and pointed out the window at a small stone marker near the side of the road. I fully expected to see a line on the ground or some kind of grand demarcation. He went on to explain about latitude and longitude and how they were a system of coordinates for navigation on the earth. I didn’t quite understand everything he was saying, but enough to want to know more.
While living in Boulder, Colorado, in 1991, my friend Eric and I were sitting on top of Flagstaff Mountain gazing at a view that stretched for miles. I noticed that the road we drove up, Baseline Road, went east in a straight line as far as I could see and I asked my friend if he knew why it was called this. He replied that it was the 40th parallel, and explained that it was the baseline for creating townships and homesteads, and one of major 19th-century governmental landscape surveys and a key marker to the settlement of the West. I had been struggling for a way to incorporate latitude and longitude into my large-format photographic work, and in that instant I had a project. I was going to document these arbitrary points of human measurement and the landscape found at the intersections.
These precise points on maps, and the areas on the ground to which they correlate, go largely unrecognized and are of little importance to most. The significance of that drive with my father 35 years ago is only now becoming clear to me, many years after I conceived of the project. It set in motion the path I have taken in life. I must thank my father for this gift he has given me, to wonder, look, question, and follow those things on the side of the road that we might overlook.
We all have memories of growing up and I was lucky to have done so in the woods of a college town. After selling our home on the South Shore of Massachusetts, our family moved to Amherst so my father could study civil engineering when I was seven years old. Here, I was neither a “townie” nor or a professor’s kid and thus existed somewhere in between. Just outside of our apartment complex, we were allowed to roam freely: down the dirt road, up the hill, into the swamp, or around the cemetery. After weathering some tough times in later adolescence and high school, I moved to Boston to attend art school. I later took up an ambitious project dealing with place and history: photographing the 40th parallel of latitude across the US at every whole degree of longitude. This new series, however, is based much closer to home and involves a different kind of location-based system—that of my childhood memories.
For “Markers: Memory,” I am returning to my hometown and exploring places with certain keen childhood memories, and considering the changes in the world and myself. Sometimes, the places are entirely changed; other times, they are remarkably the same. There are many markers and memorials on the land that delineate time and place, but these images use simple “life markers”: the spot where I caught my first fish, the woods where I first heard the word “hump,” the field where I got my first and last hit in little league, etc. Most are fairly benign memories, but some are bittersweet while others suggest childhood regret. As a result of this endeavor, new memories are being created and then overlaid onto older ones. Although the locations and memories are subjective to me, the feelings they conjure up I hope are fairly universal.
My time in the “happy valley” represents some of the best and the worst times of my life; many equally beautiful and tragic things happened here; and, as it always seems to be the case, they laid the foundation for events later in life. This project is in part is a way for me to contemplate and come to terms with my past and make amends with my family and myself today. I live in human time, and my more than 40 years means nothing to the land, yet everything to me. This project is also an attempt to reconcile this disparity in my consciousness using the precision and expanse of large format 8 x 10 panoramic photography, a technique normally reserved for 19th century surveys of the land. I hope by pursuing a more active relationship with what has been will allow for a more fluid relationship with the present and future.
Markers: History
"Markers: History" is a new series on historical markers and memorials. For these images, I have been traveling to both well-known and lesser-known historical markers and monuments in Boston and Cambridge. In many of these sites, history is not always what it appears. Sites include a Washington Elm on Cambridge Common, the Emancipation Group in Boston’s Park Square, and the Charles Sumner statue by Anne Whitney in Harvard Square, among others. Each monument has its own story and I hope that such images will encourage us to open our eyes and not only notice the history around us, but also approach it with a critical eye.
I am photographing the panoramic series with my 8x10 Deardorff camera using color transparency film. I produce these panoramas by taking 3 individual frames of Ektachrome film, moving the camera from left to right in time and space. Later, I place them together and print them, leaving the tell-tale signs of the film’s frames intact. I currently scan my film and make archival inkjet prints on Crane’s Museo Silver Rag paper. Prints are 8 x 30 inches or larger and are waxed.
Artist Statements
