My project, Mason & Dixon, traces the journey of the original 18th Century surveyors of the Mason-Dixon Line as they drew a border between Pennsylvania and Maryland. Over the past 250 years, the Line has become a violent and painful scar on the land, inscribing the legacies of slavery and colonial expansion deep in the American psyche. Because of its location along a historical fault-line, the region is a visceral example of the ongoing divisions and conflicts around the past, the present, and the future of the United States. I often ask myself how the land can support the unbearable weight of this tension.

As I photographed more, the complications across the Line became just as important as the divisions it created. Officially a boundary between two states, the Mason-Dixon Line I encountered was a shifting, symbolic borderland bridging past and present, North and South, known and unknown. When I find myself crossing this divide nothing seems to change even though the signs say it should. This is my experience along the Line, a blurry constellation of memories, tragedies, hopes, and jarring realities.

I have seen a nation unsure of itself. Utilizing large-format black and white photography, these images are my accounts of where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. They are not only documents of real places and people, they are markers of a contradictory American mythology.