This Land: Landscape and Memory in the Plains engages with the Great Plains as a landscape riddled with scars from a problematic history and a region where people attempt to carve out their lives in a climate that is often isolating and inhospitable. Shaped by the lasting impacts of manifest destiny, with all its flaws and contradictions, the plains have a perpetual tension between the past and present. This project documents the scarification of the land and the abandonment of communities reliant on unsustainable industries; at once imagining the Great Plains as both an historic and contemporary setting of national importance while simultaneously seeing the region as something discarded and forgotten. As fabled American ideals have been both dismantled and scrutinized in recent years, the perception of the Great Plains, and specifically rural America, has also shifted significantly. The romanticized myths—for which photographs share in the responsibility of constructing—has been a recurrent if not constant cultural paradigm: a land of plenty, of opportunity, of freedom, and of hope characterized by rugged individualism. The reality has been a stark contrast. The insatiable desire for land and natural resources bears significant responsibility for the displacement and ultimate genocide of Native American Tribes. Despite the fervent quest for land and power that drove settler colonists westward across the plains, today this region has the lowest population density in the United States. The increasing challenges in the present day United States, including pervasive inequality and oppression, consistent lack of sustainable means of economy, and rising susceptibility to polarization, are magnified in rural communities across the plains. The skeletal remains of once bustling communities pepper the landscape of the Great Plains providing lasting traces of human and environmental disruption; a bleak record of the past that foreshadows a possible future based on continuing unbridled and unsustainable abuse of the environment.
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