Mason & Dixon is about the reverberations of history, about how we can’t tell the violences of the past apart from those of the present. These pictures are informed by both national and personal unease around current divisions in the United States. In this work, I am searching for the origins of these divisions. Although the Mason-Dixon Line still tangibly exists as the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, its true power is as a symbol of America’s inconsistent and violent mythology. The stories we tell about ourselves: where we came from, where we are going, and what we believe in, are fundamentally at odds with the very real actions that created this country.
It is no secret we live in a divided country, one where hatred and bigotry and reactionary ideology have become more and more common. We have put up borders around ourselves and our communities. In my pictures I ask: how has the slow accumulation of these personal and cultural boundaries affected our present society and brought us to this precarious present? In many ways, then, I see this work as a frustrating attempt to understand my own country. While photographing the landscape and the people I encountered along the Line, I found not a border, but a borderland, a space of negotiation and confrontation, tense with anticipation. In this borderland, history is prone to collapse in on itself and do further harm. It’s a blurry constellation of people’s memories, tragedies, and hopes that ultimately manifests as a potent blend of nationalism and masculinity. In my pictures I cannot find a definitive story of the Line. This is simply one version, one story among countless others buried in the ground.
