The Sharpest Image

Flint is an inveterate tinkerer, a boffin par exemplar. This is evidenced not only in the camera but in the system he created to help shoot the Portrait of America, his sprawling photographic survey of the country. Standing in his driveway, he opens the back of his minivan and pulls out the large housing that holds the camera. It slides out on the aforementioned nuclear-reactor frame. "A pair of those will hold a 2,000-pound door," remarks Flint, knowing that they will never be pushed anywhere close to such engineering limits. The tripod, also built by Flint-commercial models couldn't support with the necessary stability the camera's 80 pounds-does double duty, attaching to the wheeled camera like a wheelbarrow handle for easy transport. It's all pure Flint: a machine perfectly designed and crafted, from intricate optics down to custom carrying mechanism, his ambitious vision manifest in every thousandth of an inch.

The Road Trip Goes Google
When I met up with Flint, he had just finished the 12,000-mile, 250-shot final leg of the Portrait of America. Flint and Aves's main task now is to finish the Portrait, fine-tuning the digitized images of purple mountains and fruited plains (in which the fruit can be seen), matching the colors of photographs of the Rocky Mountains by referencing souvenir samples of the actual rock. "We're very fussy," Flint says. "We consider that what we're doing is 'This is America at the turn of the century.' And we would like it to stand for all time as a good and accurate documentary."

Carol McCusker, curator of San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts, which recently hosted a show of Flint's photographs (visitors were given magnifying glasses to delve into the detail), sees in Flint an echo of William Henry Fox Talbot, the 19th-century English scholar and consummate dabbler who is the acknowledged inventor of modern photography. If some question the presence of Flint-who, by his own admission, is a scientist, "not an artist"-in an art museum, McCusker disagrees. "Technology has always driven photography," she says, expanding the tools the artists have to work with.

As word of the Gigapxl project has begun to spread, Flint has been fielding requests to adapt the technology for one purpose or another. Someone wants to make the world's largest jigsaw puzzle. An engineer from New York wants to take pictures of buildings so that the state of their brickwork can be studied for insurance purposes.