On the Plains

Rating:
Summary: picture perfect
Review: I found this book in the giftshop at the Sioux Falls airport in South Dakota. As a woman who grew up On the Plains, I found that Brown's photographs captured the true essence of the beauty one finds there. It's not simply a collection of "postcard" photographs of abandoned windmills, lonely pastures, and fragile pasque flowers. The photos depict the "real" plains, complete with its people and its architecture. Norris' introduction is, as I had anticipated, an enjoyable complement to the photos. This is a lovely book to share with people who appreciate the beauty of the Great Plains.

Rating:
Summary: An honest plain view.
Review: Photographer Peter Brown wanted this book to reflect the many jouneys he made across the Plains in his youth...''from open country to a small town, through this town, on to a larger one, and then out again into open space and sky'', he says in his Afterword. This great book of photos does just that.

Years ago I read Walter Prescott Webb's definitive study 'The Great plains' and I became fascinated by this amazing part of America (still haven't managed to get there yet) and he descibes how some of the early settlers stopped when the came up against the Plains, being used to the European countryside they just could not take the flatness, no trees, no hills and if it it was not the quietness it was the wind, blowing for days on end. These fine photos capture the flavor of what they must have seen.

The small town photos show buildings with a weather-beaten look, the Allensville, Kansas, city hall is no bigger than a simple house, the lovely aerial shot of Marfa, Texas shows a town you could drive through in a minute and after the photo of Marathon, Texas it is back to the flat landscape until the end of the book.

If you want to capture the feel of the Plains this book will do it for you...an excellent keepsake. Maybe I'll visit next year!

Rating:
Summary: An absorbing, rich portrait of the Great Plains
Review: This is a really excellent collection of 77 photos taken 1985-1995 across the high plains states from Montana to Texas. All are in richly captured color, and all manage to bring the panorama of this wide open country within the viewfinder of the still camera. Brown's achievement is to show the suggestive and telling details that transform these "empty" landscapes into spaces that are filled with drama and atmosphere.

A shot of winter prairie, south of Edgerton, Wyoming, reveals the contoured undulations of grasslands thick with frost, the banks of a shallow wash weaving into the distance, the horizon blending into the brightly overcast sky. The entire image seems sepia-tinted in the winter light. An early summer shot of ground water standing dark and rippled in a Nebraska Sandhills pond shows tufted grasses in the foreground leaning with the wind. A single slender fence post is echoed in the distance by a single tree in full leaf and just visible beyond it a windmill. The grass extends to the gently rolling horizon where a white thundercloud begins to pile upward into the vivid blue of a brightly sunlit sky.

Light, shadow, clouds, all seem still but are in movement, and many of the photographs heighten a sense of time's gradual passing -- the hour, the day, the season, the years. A roadside directory, indicating the distances to ranches has been weathered and sun-bleached. An old shingle-roofed elevator stands empty and overgrown with trees. There's a disused one-room school, white paint worn by wind and rain down to the bare boards. Tall weeds grow in the playground, and the setting sun casts the shadow of a swing set against a side wall.

And there are many signs of life, as well -- a general store with gas pumps and pop machines in front, a TV antenna overhead, and a gravel lot for parking; a barber shop with curving glass brick and shiny red tile facade, with an American flag on a pole at the curb; a last-picture-show cinema, the Rialto, with nothing on the marquee, but above it a wonderful mural of cowboys around the campfire and a chuckwagon with "Welcome to Brownville" on its canvas covering.

There are photographs of small town life -- a young man and little girl stand by the front door of a tiny house, the white siding bright in the late afternoon sun and a darkening sky behind them; a sign painter sits on the back of his truck under a hand-lettered sign, "Advertise Dammit Advertise Before We Both Go Under"; a floor-to-ceiling chalkboard is filled with for-sale notices for hay hauling, an early American sofa and matching swivel/rocker, a 3/4 ton Chev. 4x4, toy poodles, chow puppies, and a bird dog that "will point."

And this really only scratches the surface. The photographs reveal themselves slowly, and with a patient and inquisitive eye, there is much to see in all of them. If you have lived in or traveled through this region, as I have, you will see much that you recognize, recall its quieter pace of life, and marvel again at the great diversity of landscape, seasons, and weather.

Kathleen Norris has written an appreciative introduction to the book, and Brown has an essay at the end, describing a lifetime of fascination with this part of the world. The book includes a listing of all its photographs, noting the location of each and the year in which it was taken. For anyone who grew up on the Plains and now lives elsewhere, this book is like a return home. As a companion volume, I'd recommend Ian Frazier's book "Great Plains," which covers this same territory in words and with much the same attitude. Kathleen Norris' "Dakota" is another good one.