Featured photographer

Casey Orr

The Mason-Dixon Line is commonly associated with the division between the northern and southern (free and slave, respectively) states during the 1800s and American Civil War era. It is a symbolic line separating the two, not only geographically but culturally. The line was originally delineated in the mid-1700s to settle a property dispute between Lord Baltimore and George Calvert, surveyed by the astronomer Charles Mason and by the surveyor Jeremiah Dixon.

The Mason Dixon Line photographs are about the people who live along this line. They are about the other America, the one that isn’t in power, isn’t the land of plenty. Freedom and its very American connotations relating to religion, wilderness, and non centralized governing is a concept that all American children grow up with. We are told that America has no class or cast system, that anybody can be president; the rags to riches story is an American story.

The Mason-Dixon Line images question the promises of The American Dream.