LAY OF THE LAND.

The Inhabited Prairie

Terry Evans 

Wichita: University Press of Kansas, 1998 96 pp./$29.95 (hb)

Disarming the Prairie: Creating the North American Landscape

Terry Evans

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 96 pp./$55.00 (hb), $29.95 (sb)

In the last quarter century American landscape photography has been transformed from an arena of formalist abstraction to an environmentally concerned account of the histories of land use [Ed. note: See Stephen Longmire's feature article "Back West: Reviewing American Landscape Photography" in Afterimage 25, no. 2]. But 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. Culture and nature are at odds in their work: one invades the other. In styles 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 tend to show people as interlopers on the land, not as inhabitants. The people they depict use land in ways that seem antithetical to stewardship: they extend suburbs and test bombs. The strong, angry pictures with which Adams, Misrach and several of their contemporaries politicized the tradition of American landscape photography imply this country might be better off without people.

In what may prove to be the last stage of a dialectic, such work has now made possible a new generation of land use photography that addresses not only the current politics but also the long-term histories of specific sites. Less embattied but no less environmentally-oriented than the work that prepared its way, the photography of land use coming to prominence today highlights the roles 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 people. (None of the American "wilderness" was uninhabited prior to its settlement by people of European descent.) If people are understood as part of nature, if their arrangement of land into landscapes is seen as inevitable, not necessarily opportunistic, and at best even as symbiotic, landscape photographers will no longer be limited to polemical or elegiac modes. The damage done to the earth in an era of unprecedented industrialization is not diminished by 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 on the land, and perhaps helping others envision better configurations for the future. Terry Evans, who has photographed the Midwestern prairie for the past two decades, stands in a special relationship to these debates.

The fiction of wilderness is particularly hard to maintain on the prairie. Only small patches of the prairie's former immensity (once some 700 million acres) remain. Today's surviving prairies are alongside railroad tracks, under power lines, around military installations, on parcels of land too rough ever to have been farmed. In recent decades, environmentalists have restored many of these marginal areas by reseeding native plants and discouraging the growth of nonnative ones. This practice makes clear the other reason why the fiction of wilderness will never hold on this landscape. The prairie is a collaborative landscape, relying on people for its maintenance. It thrives on periodic burning, which clears away the shrubs and trees that shade out grass. With their deep roots prairie grasses are adapted to survive fire, whereas non-native species cannot. People have burned the prairie for millennia. Indians set fires to clear land or to refresh it after farming; farmers copied this process but left few prair ie grasses behind, preferring monocultural agriculture. Now restorationists burn to undo some of the damage of farming. The prairie only 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 ground from waist height, she recorded its complex weave of grasses in both black and white and color. Her first book, Prairie: Images of Ground and Sky (1986) featured these relics of a diminished ecosystem. In the preface to her new book The Inhabited Prairie, she recalls that a few years into that first project she started studying the ground 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 ecosystems but also the ways people live within them in this new 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 home 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 holds agricultural and military installations and stories spanning the land's history, many predating settlement. Some are recounted in chatty anecdotes at the end of the book.

"I like the scale of this picture," Evans remarks about a photograph she made on her own farm, Evans Farm, Ottawa County, January 18, 1992. "Our neighbor's horse is about the same distance from my eye as the land is at my usual aerial perspective of around 700 feet altitude." Of her aerial shot Oil pumping jacks in wheat field, McPherson County, December 22, 1990 she notes, "At this site, the land is mined for wheat above the ground and for oil below the surface. The snow dusting reveals information, like dusting for fingerprints." Evans invites her audience to join her in these acts of detection as she ponders the mysterious marks she finds on the land. Assaria Cemetery Saline County, January 20, 1992 is a photograph as rectilinear as a painting by Piet Mondrian, showing a square cemetery edged by lines of trees on three sides and a road on the fourth, with a railroad track clipping a comer of the frame. The only crooked line in sight is the one of tiny hoof prints sweeping gracefully about the field. "The calligraphic curves in the field were made by a single deer," Evans writes, "each hoof print plainly visible with a magnifying glass. Aerial photographs usually contain more information than is immediately accessible to the eye." Her dancing flight patterns must trace similar paths above the grid, but these photographs are the only tracks she leaves.

At least one photograph considers the overlapping strata of history on the land, but they are only apparent in the note that explains its title. Three sites, April 24, 1993 is so named, Evans explains, because "Along the curve of the field next to the river, I found a stone scraper, presumably made by early Smoky Valley people. Up on the curve of the field by the trees and road, I found old pieces of slate, porcelain and glass left by European settlers. Now we see the house and barn of the current inhabitants." Not all this information is available from the air or from the photograph--the note recounts another day's visit on the ground. If the aerial perspective flattens land, Evans compensates by including accounts of time--both her own and the historical record. (It is unfortunate so little of this written information was made available when the prints were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago last winter in Evans's show "In Place of Prairie." The inclusion of more text is planned for the show's next venue this winter at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.)

In The Inhabited Prairie, Evans expands her definition of prairie beyond the pristine plant communities featured in Prairie: Images of Ground and Sky to include a whole region. The prairie is a place in her mind now as well as on the ground. It is a geographical region whose distinguishing features have been subdued. Is a prairie still a prairie when its myriad grasses have been replaced by corn? Or, as her aerial view suggests, is disruption on the ground a small part of the land's story? What Evans is photographing cannot be seen in its entirety. Is it a body or a ruin? From the air it is clear that rivers are the fluid bones that give the land its shape. Its skin of soil is scarred and grafted by human uses that seem symbiotic, if troubling.

To Evans's surprise, she explains in her preface, the preservation issues about which she felt so passionately seemed distant from the air. At the National Guard's Smoky Hills Weapons Range near Salina, she photographed a target for bombing practice that looks like a lollipop from high above. Another photograph shows a Star of David engraved in the soil within a circle. Is this the landscape art of pre-Columbian Jews? No, Evans explains, it is another target used during the Cold War, copied from a Russian missile launch site in Cuba. But the property also includes "thirty-four thousand acres well managed for grassland, pasture, and wildlife," she notes. Wounded in one place, the land is sustained in another. What denotes violence on the ground seems an innocuous puzzle-from the air, blurring the boundary between destruction and conservation. "These photographs are neither a critique of land use nor a statement about the irony of its beauty," the photographer cautions in her preface. From a certain point of v iew, of course, they are both, even as they call these strategies into question.

In 1994 Evans moved from Salina to Chicago, where from 1995 to 1997 she photographed the 25,000 acre site of the former Joliet Arsenal, southwest of the city, as it was in the process of becoming the first national tallgrass prairie park, called Midewin, Potawatomi for "healing society." The site include relics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century farms, stone fences built by confederate prisoners in the Civil War and--most prominently--the ruins of what was once the world's largest dynamite factory, supplying the U.S. Army in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. This is the subject of Evans's other new book--this one in color--Disarming the Prairie. "Turning bullets into birds" is how one Midewin staffer described the ongoing restoration of the site to Tony Hiss, who borrowed the phrase to title his introduction to the book. In another photographer's hands, this commission would have been the perfect vehicle to polemicize against an extreme instance of abuse of a natural landscape, but to Evans it is a multi-la yered mystery to be unraveled, at once poignant and compelling. The photographs she made here urge viewers to follow as she excavates like a child on a construction site.

There are fewer aerial photographs here than in The Inhabited Prairie, but they remain among the strongest in the book. In the cover image, Ammunition storage bunkers and hay bales, September 9, 1995, Evans's square frame is evenly split between its two subjects. Bunkers and bales look oddly alike from the air, linked by that familiar ordering principle that induces people to organize their provisions in grid-like formation. Inside the book this photograph appears opposite one made from ground level, Red-winged blackbird nest, May 1995, looking down at the home of this consummate prairie dweller. The counterpoint between the two photographs, both lime green, is suggestive. At this scale, the round hay bales could easily fit into the nest, or unroll to create more just like it. The bunkers could be mistaken for bomb shelters, underground nests for people waiting for a bombing raid to pass. The passage from bullets to birds seems possible in this pairing; indeed, it may already have occurred.

Disarming the Prairie also contains seven panoramic diptychs and one triptych, It is a deceptively simple strategy that focuses attention on the space between the photographs as well as the spaces inside them, reminding viewers that not everything can be included in a picture, that there are spaces of time left out. These multiples, some of relatively undisturbed woods and meadows, others of explosives facilities that look almost pastoral now that they are overgrown, suggest the fissure of time between the arsenal's past and Midewin's future in which Evans did her work. Parts of the former arsenal still remain off limits because of the presence of toxic waste resulting from the manufacture of TNT. The grasslands have yet to grow tall, though portions of the land, as Evans shows, were preserved by their abandonment within these spacious grounds. Several interior scenes of factories in extreme states of decay may prove to be useful documents once Midewin's transformation, including the removal of many structur es, is complete, but for the time being they look like they belong in a grittier, social realist documentary.

Since completing the work in these two concurrent books, Evans has received a Guggenheim fellowship to conduct an aerial survey of mixed grass prairie from Saskatchewan to Texas, tracing the Midwest's spine. She continues to extend the scope of her project, and the associations the word "prairie" holds for her. Evidently she agrees with Donald Worster, who writes in his introduction to The Inhabited Prairie, "Studying the prairie's history is a more complicated and difficult task than we have imagined. It requires a deeper sense of time, deeper than the lives of pioneers, the passing of laws, the laying of rails, the pumping of oil. It needs a sense of time that is as deep as the soil, as broad as the sky." Looking down from the sky, Evans photographs the prairie as an organism that people love, neglect, farm, bomb and burn, but whose power they cannot avoid or ultimately control. Its history is the time frame to which her exposures aspire. Withholding judgement on human treatment of the land, she seeks to u nderstand its ongoing story, as coauthored by its inhabitants. People and land are fundamentally joined in her eyes, indeed she cannot always tell them apart. "All of these places are beautiful to me," she declares at the end of her preface to The Inhabited Prairie, "perhaps because all land, like the human body, is beautiful." In the raking light of the edges of day in which she floats with her camera, the land undulates like skin. Her vision may help heal rifts of long standing.

Evans is one of the photographers curator Andy Grundberg has selected to work on a major commission for The Nature Conservancy, entitled "Last Great Places" which will be exhibited and published in 2001. Although the 10 photographers engaged thus far have distinct and disparate styles, all have been asked to highlight the ways people inhabit the landscape they have chosen. The landscapes are scattered about the globe, and not necessarily owned by The Nature Conservancy. Evans is photographing the Oklahoma prairie for the project. She is also one of a dozen photographers, most of them known for social documentary work, involved in another major commission currently underway entitled "Indivisible," sponsored by the Center for Creative Photography and the Center for Documentary Studies and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The title refers to the intimate relationships between people and place, though the project--which will be published and exhibited in summer 2000--is primarily concerned with bringing toge ther diverse regional political discourses. Both projects encourage landscape photographers to work as documentarians of place and documentary photographers to consider the relationships their subjects have with the places they call home. The distinctions between these traditionally separate genres are rapidly dissolving.

STEPHEN LONGMIRE is a landscape photographer and an art writer based in Washington, D.C., where he is currently a research fellow at the National Museum of American Art and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.