More than 30,000 square miles of North America—an area the size of Ireland—have been paved with asphalt and concrete. Among these expanses is Highway 400, constructed in the late 1940s along an ancient trading route that once linked northern Ontario with the south-central region. Today, it serves as the main artery between Toronto’s urban core and the wilderness of the Great Lakes. Every Friday afternoon, streams of cars surge northward in a collective exodus to cottage country.

As a cultural landscape, the highway is both sublime and banal: it conveys the vastness of a frontier while embodying the logic of standardization, efficiency, and mass mobility. Cultural geographers describe such sites as “non-places”—spaces defined less by identity than by transience, circulation, and flow. In this sense, Highway 400 becomes a liminal zone where nature, technology, and ideology intersect.

I photographed the highway from above, standing on overpasses to create a perspective of detached observation. The visual language draws on formalism and minimalism, producing an anti-pastoral vista that occupies a paradox within the landscape tradition: it is at once a conduit through space and a landscape form in its own right.

–  Robert Burley, 2025