This Place, These People by David Stark (review)

As an alliance of pictures and words, This Place, These People takes its place within an established tradition of photographic works about the Great Plains. Begun as a deeply personal project by first cousins David Stark, who provided the text, and Nancy Warner, who made the black-and-white photographs, this handsome book ruminates on the lives of their family, relatives, and friends in Cuming County, Nebraska, while framing the story of their relations within an elegy for an ever-receding way of life and community.

There are no deep-set horizons, unbroken arcs of sky, or other suggestions of boundless freedom in these photographs. Rather, this is a world of shadowed interiors, like last rites for houses and structures near death and collapse. Except for the few images of storefronts and a bar interior, the majority of photographs in this book are tightly framed details of abandoned homes. Nancy Warner’s pictures, in their formal beauty, graphic compositions, and overall tendency toward abstraction, most remind one of the photographs of Aaron Siskind. In fact, the image on the book’s cover—a curtain wrapped around a window mullion, a twisting shroud at once diaphanous and sculptural—greatly resembles one of Siskind’s closeups of Roman statuary. One can viscerally imagine Warner’s explorations of deserted rooms lit by a low and lingering sun, seeking fragments of former lives in those magical combinations of light and shadow.

David Stark has lovingly transcribed the voices of Cuming County and deftly transformed their plainspoken words into poetry. These vernacular stanzas convey the hardship and humor of lives lived, but most of all, in their pauses and flat cadence we hear the sighs, and the silences, of the windblown plains themselves. At the back of the book is a list of voices, with first names, ages, and occupation. This chorus is mostly older; the youngest voice we hear from is twenty-five years old. Next to it is a vintage photograph of the Stark family from 1887 with their five young children. It is another telling detail within the framing of this story, perhaps reflecting the turn from the optimism and high expectations of the original settlers, toward memory and reflection on the part of the present inhabitants.

Not only does this book reflect the changes brought about in agricultural life over the past century and a half in the Great Plains, but its images also, as acknowledged by David Stark in his highly informative afterword, strongly resonate with other prominent photographs of this territory. Reproduced at the back of the book is an image titled “Sylvester Rawding Family,” made by the great itinerant photographer of the homesteading era, Solomon Butcher, which captures a moment of roughhewn surrealism in its display of man, beast, and melon. As is the case with many of Butcher’s images, the family has arranged themselves, like bit players about to take a bow, alongside all their domestic possessions, which have been brought outside. If Butcher’s narrative is a tale of domestic life turned inside out, Warner’s story is of the outside world brought inside, as in her picture of a weathered flap of torn wallpaper that has become as weightless as a lone cloud in a clear sky.

The images and words of Wright Morris, whom Stark also acknowledges as a source of inspiration, is both an antecedent and counterpoint to this project. Like the present authors, Morris combined photographs and voices, but no faces or portraits, to convey the weight of life in the Plains. But Morris’s photographs of structures and details, especially in The Inhabitants, are shot outdoors, hard lit by the high sun; by contrasting the deep folds of shadows against their blazing facades, he makes those worn buildings even more defiant in their continued uprightness. As noted, Warner works from the inside toward the outdoors, and in her pictures the play of shadows becomes much more...