by Terry Evans, from the series, Prairie Scrolls 1978 and 2007.

You should click the link above and look at the images in the Prairie Scrolls series. But first, you should take a look at some of the other series at Evans’s site, such as the also-excellent Steel Work- Raw Materials 2007-2009, which open with the aerial perspective that seems (judging by her website) to be characteristic of Evans’s work.

Her aerial photography is very good, and much more interesting than most aerial photography. But I think it’s particularly interesting in relation to the images from the Prairie Scrolls series, of which there are only a tantalizing few.

Of Prairie Scrolls, Evans, writes:

My visits started in early March and as the spring progressed and grasses and legumes and other plants emerged from the ground, I began to see the rich ecological diversity of a prairie. This was my first experience of seeing an undisturbed ecosystem and I was almost overcome with passion to know it better. Its subtle beauty completely captured me. I came every day to photograph the ground. This eighty acre prairie belonged to Nick and Joyce Fent, who gave me a key to the gate, a key to a place so full of beautiful information that I knew then that I could explore it for years and still not know it all, not even close. I made over 4000 black and white pictures of the ground over the next year before I finally raised my camera up and started including the horizon line and color….

I decided to return to this earliest work and to scan some of these negatives. At first, I made single images, but quickly became bored with them. A visit to the New York Public Library to see an exhibition of EHON books, Japanese scroll books that were about personal subjects, like poems, convinced me to make scrolls from my grasses pictures. In the original work, I did not include the pictures I’d made for myself of my friends and family and dogs that sometimes accompanied me. Those pictures were not part of the ‘serious’ work of seeking to understand the structure of the prairie. Now, almost thirty years later, I understand that they are part of the story, too. So, these prairie scrolls are not the reprinting of earlier work, they are instead, a body of work that has required almost thirty years to become fully realized.

The Prairie Scrolls work in which Evans “came every day to photograph the ground,” feel strikingly congruent with her aerial photography. Of course, aerial photography is also just a way of photographing the ground — albeit from a different height. But I think there is also something that unifies the series beyond just the direction the camera is pointed. I think Evans’s phrase “beautiful information” is particularly apt; it gets at a certain quality most of her images share — combining something of the map with something of the landscape.

There is also a certain distinctly mystical quality to the work that I find appealing, but which some may not. I think it is rather like what Minor White would produce if here were a cartographer, if that makes sense.