- Census tracts do not describe a territory, nor are they really about people. They are statistical frames filled with facts, pinned to the land to give form to columns of demographic data. We rarely see them mapped. But tract boundaries do exist; they are published as an enormous digital folder of shapefiles that report the longitude and latitude of points on the edge, accurate to within a millimeter. 12 To make @everytract, Freeman purchases satellite images from a commercial provider, then slices them according to those shapefiles. And here, at the moment of inscribing a line, is where the photograph loses the precision of the purely statistical. Where it begins to blur. “The question of where a line is,” Freeman told me, “is what I’m very interested in, a line in a piece of map data.” 13
Every blade has a kerf. Run a saw through a plank: the space lost to sawdust, the void created, is the kerf. Since Freeman is working with pixels — square units of color that cannot be cut — his digital blade has an eccentric kerf, slicing a ragged path along the edge of a census tract. And since the size of a tract is determined by its population, there are extreme differences in scale. The 147,805 square miles of Alaska’s Yukon-Koyukuk County are covered by four census tracts, while the 33.77 square miles of New York County are covered by 288. When those images show up in my timeline, a single square brown dot of Alaskan earth might represent 50 acres, while a gray dot of Manhattan is only 5 square feet. Digital sawdust floats down to Freeman’s feet, the piles deeper for rural America, though the result is the same no matter where he cuts: something real is lost.
I asked Freeman about the kerf of his blade, about how closely his pictures match the tracts defined by the Census Bureau. “I can’t show you a census tract,” he replied, “because a census tract is. … I don’t know what a census tract is.”