If you want to grasp the rich complexity of the past, observes
environmental historian Donald Worster, you could do worse than
spend time on the prairie. Seen from high above, it is an orderly
grid of farmland; closer to ground level, it reveals the
industriousness of humanity in the making and remaking of the land.
Considered by many to be lacking in inspiration, the prairie is
shown by photographer Terry Evans to be a land of varied textures.
Evans seeks to have us pay attention to the ways we perceive both
the natural and the cultural in this underappreciated landscape,
and in this stunning collection of photographs she reads the land
for the stories it has to tell.
Widely known for her spectacular photographs of pristine
prairie, Evans here works at low altitudes to focus on the land as
an inhabited place. These fifty black-and-white images document
specific locations and disclose some of the contradictions and
mysteries about how we live on the prairie. Through her lens we
view the site of an ancient Indian village, targets on the Smoky
Hill Weapons Range, and old country cemeteries; observe the
startling contours of plowed fields and sandpits; and witness the
tranquility of deer grazing on new winter wheat. All of these
images help us to understand the layers of life on the prairie and
the complex interweaving of nature and man.
"Outdoor pictures are supposed to be scenes of picturesque
beauty," Worster writes in his accompanying essay, "and the
prairies have seldom met that ideal for most people. Only a few
artists have tried to figure out how to get its tangled, intricate
weave into a revealing frame." Terry Evans has met that challenge,
staking out a middle ground between the extremes of wilderness and
grid to show us that the prairie is more than a commodity to be
subdivided and sold. She brings to "The Inhabited Prairie" a keen
sense of understanding combined with deep artistic vision, opening
our eyes to a prairie we live with but perhaps seldom see.
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