Driftless: Photographs from Iowa

by Danny Wilcox Frazier

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In Driftless, Danny Wilcox Fraziers dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people, resources, and services are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America was being emptied. Fraziers arresting photographs take us into Iowas abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there. These families, linked to the heartland by generations before them, are joined by more recent arrivals: Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews praying, Amish women laughing together over cards, Mennonites walking down a dirt road, Latinos working in the field. Fraziers camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever; harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving. This collection of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural Iowa, but it is also more that that. It shows what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Fraziers photographs are rich in emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America. Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, Fraziers stunning images evoke the brilliance of Robert Franks The Americans. Read Less

In Driftless, Danny Wilcox Fraziers dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people, resources, and services are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America was being emptied. Fraziers arresting photographs take us into Iowas abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there. These families, linked to the heartland by generations before them, are joined by ... Read More