Riding the 33rd Parallel is a virtual road trip from Florida to California via the Harn’s Photography Collection. Forty-eight photographs by twenty-two photographers were made along the 33rd parallel (more or less) encompassing Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. Work by seven new photographers have been added to the Harn’s photography collection and are on view for the first time in this exhibition. The time span is 1961 to the present. Some images are grouped by similar or opposing conditions within one or more states, e.g., NASA spectators in Florida and California; Texas’s dry Panhandle versus its hurricane-soaked Gulf Coast. Some images follow Ansel Adams’s grand landscape style, while others toxic industries and extreme weather or truly awesome human ingenuity.
Some of America’s most scenic and dramatic topographies are in the south and southwest. It’s no wonder many landscape photographers (always eager travelers) are drawn there. Their photographs illustrate our unique American landscapes and histories. To find them, they followed old stagecoach ruts that turned into two-lane blacktops leading into small-town “Main Streets” or busy waterways. Here, as photographer Mark Klett says, are indisputable records of “what we have collectively made of this nation we inhabit and by implication who we have become.”
