Public Lands Institute: A Growing Photographic Index of American Public Lands

Key facts

• The Public Lands Institute is an ongoing photographic index of American public lands made by one person in black and white with no planned endpoint.
• It currently holds 91 sites in 20 states and 746 photographs, gathered under nearly forty managing agencies.
• Sites include national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, state parks, county reservoirs, nature preserves, and game areas.
• Yellowstone and a state park in eastern Iowa are entered on the same footing and photographed the same way.
• The pictures are indexical and anti-spectacular, made in whatever light the day offers, with no waiting for weather or hour.
• Each site has a written record covering geological formation, Indigenous territorial history and cession record, biodiversity observed on the ground, the mechanism by which the land became public, and a shadow history of what the interpretive signage leaves out.
• Research comes only from primary sources, including EPA cleanup databases, Park Service administrative histories, National Archives records, Chronicling America, court records, and treaty texts; travel writing and agency press releases are not used.
• Everything is dedicated to the public domain under CC0, with full-resolution TIFFs going to Wikimedia Commons and raw files staying in the project archive, free to download, alter, print, or republish without permission, payment, or attribution.