“Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn’t”*…
N 40° 00’ 00” W 109° 00’ 00” Rangely, Colorado, 2000
Photographer Bruce Myren has taken photos along the 40th degree of latitude across the United States, at every whole degree of longitude…
He explains:
The core idea of this project came to me while I was living for a year in Boulder, Colorado in 1991. A friend and I were sitting on top of Flagstaff Mountain and gazing at the scene. I noticed that the road we drove up, Baseline Road went east in a straight line as far as I could see. I asked my friend if he knew why it was called this. He replied that it was the 40th parallel of latitude, and went on to explain that it was the baseline for creating townships and homesteads, and was a key marker to the settlement of the West. I had a project: I was going to document these arbitrary points of human measurement and the landscape found at the intersections.
And so he did…
N 40° 00’ 00” W 83° 00’ 00” Columbus, Ohio, 1999
Read the whole fascinating story at PetaPixel, and see more of this series and of Myren’s other work on his site.
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As we trip on tryptophan, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that Carl J.E. Eliason received the first patent for a “Vehicle for Snow Travel”– a snowmobile.
