In March 2017, University of Texas Press published This Land: An American Portrait, a visual meditation on American landscape and identity by longtime Oxford American contributor Jack Spencer. The photographer spent thirteen years working on the project and traveled more than eighty thousand miles across all forty-eight contiguous states looking for scenes and moments that he says are “an expression of the perception of an ideal.”

Spencer’s “Starfall,” St. Augustine, Florida (2008), graces the cover of the Spring 2017 issue of the magazine, below.

 Here are a few more images from his remarkable book. 

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