Land Of The Free

Land of the Free began as a treasure hunt through the streets of New York City. Armed with a camera, Linda Zacks set out to photograph the American flag wherever it appeared — not on flagpoles or in predictable places of ceremony, but in the wild: stretched across concrete mixers, plastered above the chaos of Times Square, lying on the ground, billowing freely in open sky, or sprayed across walls as massive graffiti that hits you squarely in the face. Each sighting was a small discovery, and together they became something larger.

The resulting 48 × 48 inch mixed-media painting is a collage built entirely from those photographs — fragments of the flag reassembled into a new kind of portrait of the nation that produced it. The work traces its origins to Zacks' book Can't Walk a Straight Line, copies of which were sold at the International Center of Photography, and carries forward that project's restless, searching eye.

What emerges is neither celebration nor critique, but something more honest: an image of a symbol living its actual life in the city — weathered, exuberant, incidental, and ubiquitous all at once. The flag, it turns out, is everywhere. What we make of that is up to us.