The Inhabited Prairie Terry Evans Wichita: University Pres of Kansas.

The Inhabited Prairie

Terry Evans

Wichita: University Pres of Kansas, 1998 96 pp/$2995 (hb)

Disarming the Prairie: Creating the North American Landscape

Terry Evans

Baltimore: John Hopkins University Pres 1998 96 pp/$5500 (hb) $2995 (sb)

In the last quarter hundred American landscape photography has been transformed from an arena of formalist abstraction to an environmentally disquieted account of the histories of land use [ note: diocese Stephen Longmire's feature article "Back West: Reviewing American Landscape Photography" in Afterimage 25 no. 2] further until quite recently history typically meant politics, and land use almost invariably meant abuse. Pioneers of the photography of land use, like Robert Adams and Richard Misrach, portray the relationship between Americans and their landscapes as a pitched battle. agriculture and nature are at additionals in their work: one invades the other. In denominations designed to appear unemotive and strictly documentary, Adams and Misrach polemicize against this affront. The irony is that, like the formalist photographers of wilderness they displaced--Adams's namesake Ansel foremost among them--both guard to show people as interlopers upon the land, not as inhabitants. The family they depict use land in ways that be seen antithetical to stewardship: they reach forth suburbs and test bombs. The puissant angry pictures with which Adams, Misrach and several of their contemporaries politicized the tradition of American landscape photography imply this geographical division might be better off without people

In what may show to be the last stage of a dialectic, like work has now made possible a fresh generation of land use photography that addresses not solely the current politics but also the long-term histories of specific sites. Les embattied if it were not that no less environmentally-oriented than the work that prepared its way, the photography of land use coming to prominence today highlights the parts people have played as landscape makers, thereby complicating ideas of nature as "other" and opposing the great American fiction of wilderness as a mythic place without the public (None of the American "wilderness" was uninhabited prior to its adjustment by people of European descent) If populace are understood as part of nature, if their arrangement of land into landscapes is seen as inevitable, not necessarily opportunistic, and at best uniform as symbiotic, landscape photographers will no longer be limited to polemical or elegiac fashions The damage done to the earth in an era of unprecedent industrialization is not diminished through this idea, rather it clears the way for photographers and writers to become archaeologists and historians of place, helping to assess the impact of technology in succession the land, and perhaps helping others envision better configurations for the that will be Terry Evans, who has photographed the Midwestern prairie for the past brace decades, stands in a special relationship to these debates.

The fiction of wilderness is particularly hard to maintain forward the prairie. Only small patches of the prairie's former immensity (once more [i]or[/i] less 700 million acres) remain. Today's surviving prairies are alongside railroad tracks, in subordination to power lines, around military installations, in succession parcels of land too craggy ever to have been farmed. In late decades, environmentalists have restored many of these marginal areas according to reseeding native plants and discouraging the product of nonnative ones. This practice makes clear the other reason on what account the fiction of wilderness will at no time hold on this landscape. The prairie is a collaborative landscape, relying upon people for its maintenance. It thrives forward periodic burning, which clears away the bushs and trees that shade abroad grass. With their deep radicals prairie grasses are adapted to survive fire, whereas non-native species cannot. nation have burned the prairie for millennia. Indians fix fires to clear land or to repair it after farming; farmers copied this proces still left few prair ie grasses behind, preferring monocultural agriculture. Now restorationists calcine to undo some of the damage of farming. The prairie merely survives with appropriate use.

When Evans began photographing the prairie 20 years ago, she was strictly interested in unplowed, virgin prairie. Looking down at the earth from waist height, she recorded its web weave of grasses in the pair black and white and color. Her first work Prairie: Images of Ground and canopy of heaven (1986) featured these relics of a diminished ecosystem In the preface to her recently made known book The Inhabited Prairie, she recalls that a not many years into that first throw out she started studying the land from mid-air, cruising low in small planes with pilots she calls her "dance partners." This altitude expanded her field of vision, enabling her to address not just the prairie ecosystem unless also the ways people live within them in this modern book. A formally adventurous experiment in visual archaeology, The Inhabited Prairie consists of black and white, primarily aerial studies of the land around Evans's long-time family of Salina made between 1990 and 1993 The square frame of her Hasselblad mimics the quadrants of the government-mandate d section lines, visible as roads from the air. Banking and tilting her frame, Evans records an alternate grid that keep possession ofs agricultural and military installations and stories spanning the land's history, many predating reconciliation Some are recounted in chatty anecdotes at the conclusion of the book.