Iconic Great Plains

Red Cloud, NE, 2002

Nobody thinks about the Great Lakes when seeing a picture like this one. It's just plain "Great Plains," iconic Great Plains.

Why? is a question that doesn't require genius. Because a broad stretch of land behind a solitary tree is essential plains stuff (somewhere east of Hudson, SD, 2003), or even this one in the icy cold of winter.

But I'm changing thing here (west of Sioux Center, 2004) because this shot actually features the frozen corn stubble, not the tree, which is little more than frame. Because this one gives starring role to what it does, the photograph is not as "iconic," not as Great Plains-ish, even though the stretch of farmland rolls out a long, long ways. Pardon the pun, but I think I'm going far afield, so let's get back to the subject--lone trees on the prairie--like this one, northeast of Lebanon (2005)--

(you've got to love that thunderhead sneaking up back there, treacherous, threatening beauty). 

I've tried to grab this shot dozens of times because it feels so iconic. I may well be the only person on earth who thinks this particular composition of tree and sky and stretch of land, at dawn, can be almost perfectly beautiful. 

There's a touch of horror here, so kill the chill and have a look at another, same spot of land, same untended dirt road, a month earlier, looking west, not east at dawn. 

Or this one, yet another (2008)--same land, different tree, one of my all-time favorites (there's no accounting for taste). 

I hate to go back to winter (it's going to be warmer today, after what seems like a long spell of cold), but I've always liked the shimmering silver of this shot from 2008, just west of Sioux Center. The tree is gone today. It's called progress, I guess.

Or how about this?--a variation on theme--a pair of twins out on a sweet stretch of land not far from Beloit, Iowa (2009), late spring (corn is looking good).

This shot--Blue Mound, Minnesota (2010)--may send you scrambling back to the top because something about this one resembles the very first image, even though it's a bundle of states apart and surrounded by different climates almost. In a thematic sense, however, the Red Cloud shot at the top and at the Blue Mound shot at the bottom are, in essence, the same photograph. 

This show has gone on long enough; I'd just as soon finish the first decade of the album. One or two more from 2011 maybe, and then I'll quit and take up the cause tomorrow again: twenty years of shots of the very same subject. I'm hoping you don't get bored.

This first selection from 2011 is rather obviously not a tree, and the barbed wire feels uncomfortably of the Holocaust. But I can't help thinking this one is a relative of the others, although I'd hesitate to call it them kissing cousins.  The sky, so bountifully dramatic, is pure South Dakota.

Where the sky is as overwhelming as the open land, sometimes the spectacle of dawn flat out refuses to play second-fiddle to any land-hugging tree or anything or anybody. In a bath of color, a early morning sky simply takes over the stage. One blessed, solitary tree can't hold a candle to the drama playing up against the dome of heaven. 

An album of photographs this morning. Hope you don't mind. Even in a place most people would say is not particularly comely, a couple of random shots can still shine.