The Working Landscape

Living in the Midwest, farmland becomes so familiar that it's easy to stop seeing it.

Fields stretch to the horizon. Corn grows taller through the summer. Soybeans fill the spaces between country roads. Barns, silos and grain elevators rise above a landscape that can seem almost completely flat.

For years, I simply thought of it as the countryside.

The more I photograph it, the more I realize how little of this landscape is accidental.

Nearly everything has been shaped by human hands.

Fields are divided into grids. Crops grow in precise rows. Roads follow property lines. Drainage moves water from the land. Power lines cut across the horizon. Grain elevators rise above small towns like monuments to the industry surrounding them.

Even the seemingly empty space has a purpose.

There is also a rhythm to this landscape.

Spring brings dark soil and freshly worked fields. Summer slowly turns everything green. By late season, corn towers along the roads and temporarily changes the view entirely. Harvest opens the landscape again, leaving behind stubble, machinery and enormous skies. Then winter strips everything down to its simplest form.

I find myself photographing all of it.

The old barns leaning slightly more each year. Modern agricultural buildings built entirely for function. Farm equipment sitting at the edge of a field. Telephone poles disappearing toward the horizon. A grain elevator visible from miles away. The geometry created by rows of crops and the occasional tree that somehow remained.

Some of these scenes are beautiful.

Others are simply ordinary.

That's part of what interests me.

These aren't untouched landscapes. They are places where generations of people have worked, altered and depended upon the land. Agriculture has shaped not only what the Midwest looks like, but the roads we travel, the towns we built and the lives of the people who call this place home.

I don't necessarily set out looking for the perfect landscape photograph.

Most of the time, I'm simply driving through a place I've driven through a hundred times before when something makes me look again.

A field.

A barn.

A line on the horizon.

Light moving across the land.

Something ordinary that, for a moment, doesn't feel ordinary at all.

This is the working landscape.