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    This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains
    This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains
    This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains
    Ebook134 pages38 minutes

    This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains

    By David Stark and Nancy Warner

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    About this ebook

    Nancy Warner’s photographs and David Stark’s interviews and reflections provide fresh perspective on the history and culture of a distinctly American phenomenon. Continuing in the tradition of Solomon D. Butcher, who photographed some of the first midwestern settlers in the nineteenth century, and Wright Morris, who combined photographic and verbal accounts of farmers’ lives in the twentieth century, Stark and Warner explore a way of life that continues to adapt in the face of wrenching change.

    This book pairs images of abandoned farm places with the plain-spoken recollections of the people who still live in nearby communities. In his afterword, Stark grounds the project in the relationship between people and their land; the cadences and tough-minded humor of everyday speech; the ongoing mechanization of farming; the lure of cities for the young; and genetic and chemical innovations for improving crop yields. The result is both art and document, evoking memories, emotions, and open-ended questions for anyone with rural American roots.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherColumbia University Press
    Release dateOct 29, 2013
    ISBN9780231537902
    This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains
    Author

    David Stark

    David Stark’s architectural practice designed many energy-efficient buildings, some of them award- winning, but wind, solar and biofuels did not make sense in business cases. After retiring, he considered the same parameters for national energy strategies and found them just as wanting.

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      Book preview

      This Place, These People - David Stark

      THIS PLACE, THESE PEOPLE

      THIS PLACE, THESE PEOPLE

      LIFE AND SHADOW ON THE GREAT PLAINS

      PHOTOGRAPHS BY NANCY WARNER TEXT BY DAVID STARK

      COLUMBIA

      UNIVERSITY

      PRESS

      NEW YORK

      Columbia University Press

      Publishers Since 1893

      New York   Chichester, West Sussex

      cup.columbia.edu

      Copyright © 2014 David Stark and Nancy Warner

      All rights reserved

      E-ISBN 978-0-231-53790-2

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Warner, Nancy, 1951–

      This place, these people : life and shadow on the Great Plains /photographs by Nancy Warner ; text by David Stark.

      pages   cm

      Photographs by Nancy Warner accompanied by the words of Nebraska farmers and residents.

      ISBN 978-0-231-16522-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53627-1 (electronic)

      1. Nebraska—Pictorial works. 2. Farm life—Nebraska—Pictorial works. 3. Nebraska—Rural conditions—Pictorial works. I. Stark, David, 1950– II. Title.

      F667.W37 2013

      978.2—dc23

      2013000946

      A Columbia University Press E-book.

      CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

      Cover photograph: Nancy Warner

      Cover and book design: Lisa Hamm

      References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

      Columbia University Press would like to express its appreciation for assistance given by

      Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund in the publication of this book.

      To our family  

      In all my life I’ve never seen anything so crowded, so full of something, as the rooms of a vacant house.

      WRIGHT MORRIS, The Inhabitants

      CONTENTS

      Preface

      Photographs and Voices

      Family Album

      Afterword: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains

      DAVID STARK

      List of Voices

      List of Photographs

      Acknowledgments

      PREFACE

      AROUND THE TIME this book went into production, I read the essay Small Rooms in Time by Ted Kooser, the Nebraskan poet. This sentence struck me: I began to think about the way in which the rooms we inhabit, if only for a time, become unchanging places within us, complete in detail.

      The photographs in this book tell stories of different farm places. I made them between 2001 and 2008, in and around Cuming County, Nebraska, where my great-grandfather homesteaded and my parents grew up. People in the area helped me find and get access to many of the places. They were amused and curious about why these old broken-down buildings warranted so much of my attention. In 2008 I installed the first large exhibit of the series at the Great Plains Art Museum in Lincoln. The photographs evoked strong emotional reactions from viewers. During this and subsequent exhibit receptions, people approached me with memories and stories triggered by details in the images.

      My cousin David Stark first learned of the project when Black & White magazine published a selection of the photographs and an interview with me. He was intrigued. During a visit he made to San Francisco in 2010, we got the idea to collaborate on this book. We traveled to Nebraska then, and again in 2011. We sought out and talked to relatives and other people in Cuming County, most of whom had lived in these places. The book began to take shape.

      Those voices are recorded here just as David heard them. The pairings of the photographs with the text are based not on specific stories, or even

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