The topology of typical Chern insulators is rooted in the periodicity of the system along two directions of real space. In this paper, we depart from this standard concept and demonstrate that a generic non-Hermitian photonic waveguide periodic along a single direction of real space can be regarded as a subcomponent of an extended system with a synthetic dimension and with a nontrivial Chern topology. We show that the number of bands below a bandgap of a generic waveguide determines the gap Chern number of the extended system. It is theoretically and numerically demonstrated that in real space the gap Chern number gives the number of gapless Tamm state branches localized at the system boundary, when its geometry is continuously displaced by one lattice period. In the non-Hermitian case, the Tamm states connect different bands in the complex plane.