BOOK

LATITUDE ZERO BOOK

A shift happened in 1999 during sweltering summer heat after an intensive 6 week film-making course at NYU, thinking I needed to slow down, change professions and find a better deodorant. My final short film, NO beginning NO end, was a poetic Manhattan wandering replete with circular imagery. Leave it to schlepping a battered 16mm Arriflex with its heavy battery pack strapped around my waist to inspire me to pick up my eclectic mix of still analog cameras again and embark on an epic journey to create a living map of the world at the beginning of the 3rd millennium. I just needed a soul slaking red 'thread'.....

"What is the earth’s largest circle?" as I mumbled grabbing the world map and saw the red line effortlessly pass through geopolitical hotbeds; Colombia, Somalia and DRCongo, places & people laden with history. I couldn’t reign in my explorer-documentary instincts to live IN the world and not ON the world and packed up my apartment, shipped everything back to my parent’s farm and flew to Brazil with 2 bricks of TriX film, empty journals and plethora of topographical maps to begin my life with no keys. If the world was my oyster, then the equator became my pearl.

LATITUDE ZERO BOOK is a poetic visual rhapsody dedicated to the equatorial people who graciously shared their homes, hearths and humor and emboldened my westward journey around the equator, beginning in Macapa, Brazil in 2000 and ending on the other side of the Atlantic in Sao Tome in 2003. Chasing the sunsets, breathing in the NOW, I freelanced for various editorial publications to pay immediate expenses while staying within my 1 degree North - 1 degree South bandwidth. This 2 degree zone became my sacred space to document who and what lives at the center and how do they survive during this millennial transition? I knew the landscape, people and politics would not remain the same nor would I.

Finding a publisher took 5 years and several maquettes later. Disillusioned, I scrapped all versions and xeroxed my entire contact sheet collection (over 350 rolls of film) and cut out every contact image that sang to and through me and pasted them into a homemade double flip book, a design to emphasize circumnavigating the world, where one could pick it up and begin anywhere while turning it around and around. Maarten Schilt and Teun van der Heijden in Amsterdam, loved the idea while Maarten provided the prowess of a fine-tuning publisher who had a sweet spot for B&W images telling a fascinating story and Teun provided his uncanny design skill to incorporate part of my journals and finding the right editing rhythm to the flow of images. Serendipitously, I crossed paths with Paul Theroux, an acclaimed American writer and fellow intrepid explorer, in a border town in Ecuador with Colombia in 2001 while on my journey. We remained in contact and his forewards grace both sides of my award winning flip book. The 1^st 100 copies are the limited edition which include a print&book combo both numbered&signed treasured inside a streamlined slip case. The regular version is just the book. CONTACT me if interested.

By June 2010 it finally hit the shelves, the same month and year my son, Konrad Jean-Sebastien Troupin, was born in Thailand. Motherhood consumed me in Bangkok as did the excruciating traffic jams while finding exhibition-lecture venues in Asia. Kinshasa base came 3 years later, so my precious Belgian agronomist husband could finish his incredible 39 year career where he began in 1982, at the same bend in the Congo River where we met while I was on my equatorial journey.

Latitude Zero book has its own facebook page and I was honored to be a guest speaker at TEDx in 2010 dedicated to the theme, EXPLORE, and 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.

Robert Norman "Bob" Ross(October 29, 1942 – July 4, 1995) was an American painter, art instructor, and television host.[1] He is best known as the creator and host of The Joy of Painting, a television program that appeared on PBS in the United States, Canada and Europe.

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.

(555) 555-5555

mymail@mailservice.com

Street Name, City Name

Country, Zip code