A new coffee table book has arrived featuring the Great Plains. This one is called Heartland and it’s by David Plowden. The book is a series of very beautiful black and white photographs from various places around the Great Plains, and a number from places just a bit further east, such as Iowa and Illinois. There are no people in the photos, only landscapes – often with a building or two in various states of neglect.
Most of the scenes have a cropland theme, as opposed to an open ranchland or grassland theme, but the photos do a fantastic job of capturing the enormous space, and even though they are photographs, they somehow also seem to capture the silence very well. It becomes easy to imagine yourself immersed in each space, and standing there, wondering at the vastness and the stillness.
The quote below is from the author’s introduction – a nice endorsement for the Great Plains!
“This is a book about a part of America that I have grown to love above all other places. It is a region often overlooked, ignored as being too flat, unexciting. . . . This land is “America” to me. It embodies what I yearned for as a young man. It is the very antithesis of the pervading darkness of New England, the claustrophobic canyon walls of New York City where I grew up. I am talking about my adopted home.”
