Latitude Zero: Stauder's Epic Equatorial Photo Journey

LATITUDE ZERO BOOK

In 1999, after completing an intensive six-week filmmaking course at NYU, I felt an urgent need to slow down and reevaluate my frenetic life. My final short film, NO Beginning NO End, a poetic journey around Manhattan rich in circular imagery, sparked a profound shift within me. Weary of editorial dictates, I rediscovered my lyrical self - the passion that first led me to pick up a camera and witness LIFE in its raw form. With an eclectic mix of analog cameras, I embarked on an epic circular journey to create a living map of the world at the dawn of the third millennium. All I needed was a soul-slaking red 'thread.'

My gaze soon fixed on the equator - the effortless red line stitching together geopolitical hotbeds like Colombia, Indonesia, Somalia, and the DRC, places steeped in history. My explorer-documentary instincts took over. I packed up my Parisian studio, sent everything back to my parents' farm, and flew to Brazil with nothing but two bricks of Tri-X film, empty journals, and a stack of topographical maps—ready for a life without keys. If the world was my oyster, the equator became my pearl.

Latitude Zero became a poetic visual rhapsody dedicated to the equatorial people who graciously shared their homes, hearths, and humor, emboldening my westward journey around the equator, starting in Macapa, Brazil in 2000 and ending in São Tomé in 2003. Chasing sunsets and living wholly in the present, I freelanced for various editorial publications to sustain the trip while staying within my 1° North – 1° South bandwidth. This 2-degree zone became my sacred space to document the people and landscapes of the equator at the turn of the millennium. I knew neither the landscape, the people, nor I would remain the same.

After five years and several maquettes, I abandoned all previous versions and crafted a handmade tome from my entire contact sheet archive - over 350 rolls of film. Cutting and pasting every resonating xerox image into a double flip book, I emphasized the idea of endless circumnavigation: a journey with no end or beginning.

Publisher Maarten Schilt and designer Teun van der Heijden in Amsterdam embraced the concept. Their collaboration refined the design, integrating fragments from my journals and shaping the book’s rhythm. A serendipitous encounter with novelist and explorer Paul Theroux on the Ecuador–Colombia border in 2001 led to his forewords gracing both sides of the finished volume. The first 100 copies are a limited edition - each including a signed print and book, both numbered and housed in a sleek slipcase. The regular edition preserves the unique double flip book format. Please CONTACT me if you’re interested.

By June 2010, the book finally hit the shelves, the same month my son, Konrad Jean-Sebastien Troupin, was born in Thailand. Motherhood in Bangkok, coupled with the cities notorious traffic jams while seeking exhibition and lecture venues across Asia, consumed me. Three years later, we moved to Kinshasa, where my Belgian agronomist husband completed his remarkable 40-year career - at the very bend in the Congo River where we first met during my equatorial journey.

That same year, I was honored to speak at TEDx (theme: EXPLORE) as well as at the Royal Geographic Society in Hong Kong, Explorers Club in NYC, Mountain Film Festival in Telluride among other lectures, exhibits and press before and after this pivotal year.

Horizontal Scroller

Click, swipe or use the keyboard arrows to navigate through the horizontal scroller.

We've enabled "hinted captions" in this demo, where you can see the title and the first line of the caption. Click "read more" (or the image itself) to open the full caption. You can select from other caption and UI options in the CMT.

Long overviews will scroll inline and can contain images or videos, as you can see below.

Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928) is a black-and-white animated short film that is considered a landmark in animation history. The film stars Mickey Mouse in his first sound appearance and helped to usher in the era of synchronized sound cartoons. Steamboat Willie remains an iconic piece of popular culture today.

Hasui Kawase(May 18, 1883 – November 7, 1957) was a prominent Japanese painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and one of the chief printmakers in the shin-hanga ("new prints") movement.

Kawase worked almost exclusively on landscape and townscape prints based on sketches he made in Tokyo and during travels around Japan. However, his prints are not merely meishō (famous places) prints that are typical of earlier ukiyo-e masters such as Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Kawase's prints feature locales that are tranquil and obscure in urbanizing Japan.

In 1923 there was a great earthquake in Japan that destroyed most of his artwork.

Alphonse Legros(8 May 1837 – 8 December 1911), painter, etcher and sculptor was born in Dijon.

As he had casually picked up the art of etching by watching a comrade in Paris working at a commercial engraving, so he began the making of medals after a walk in the British Museum, studying the masterpieces of Pisanello, and a visit to the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris. Legros, considered the traditional journey to Italy a very important part of artistic training, and in order that his students should have the benefit of such study he devoted a part of his salary to augment the income available for a travelling studentship. His later works, after he resigned his professorship in 1892, were more in the free and ardent manner of his early days—imaginative landscapes, castles in Spain, and farms in Burgundy, etchings like the series of "The Triumph of Death," and the sculptured fountains for the gardens of the Duke of Portland at Welbeck Abbey.