Iowa: Echoes of a Vanishing Landscape: Photographs 2004 - 2016

Before I began taking pictures in Iowa, I was photographing interiors of decaying industrial buildings in the northeastern United States. In 2002, I read a series of newspaper articles that described momentous changes in the agricultural economy of the Midwest and the resulting transformation of the landscape: unused and abandoned farm buildings left to decay in the countryside and in small towns. Perhaps due to my American studies background, I was intrigued by the idea of exploring this agrarian landscape and comparing it to the decaying industrial America that I had been photographing.

In an attempt to define the purpose of my photography in Iowa, I came up with the explanation that I was photographing the vanishing architectural landscape of the single-family farm. I always felt that the description was incomplete, because the single-family farm, by my thinking, contained much more than the farmstead alone. I have gradually come to understand that my notion of the single-family farm is both broad and complex. It may have been a single entity - the family - that owned and ran the farm, but it was a vast community of people and an infrastructure that collectively comprised this culture.

My definition includes the traditional farmstead, the croplands, the pastures, and all that is contained within the physical boundaries of the farm. But it also encompasses small towns and shops where farm products were traded, banks and businesses on which the farms relied, the roads connecting farms to towns and to each other, the railways and trains that transported what the farms produced, the county seat that supplied public services and support, and the grain elevators that provided a critical link in the distribution of farm products.

Besides not knowing precisely what I hoped to photograph when I began my travels to Iowa in the spring of 2004, I never imagined that I would make twenty visits over the next thirteen years, or that Grinnell, my base in Iowa, would become a second home to me. I have witnessed the disappearance of so many of the structures that I have photographed. I have heard many stories about the farm that was once down the road or the grain elevator that used to be by the tracks in the next town. I once came to a hilltop from which I could see perhaps a dozen farmsteads in all directions. I recognized that this was what Iowa once looked like. It was a rare view at the time, and today even more so. Now, I see for myself how the landscape changes when a farmhouse or barn or fencerow vanishes and is replaced seemingly overnight by more corn, or how the introduction of an ethanol plant or wind farm alters the landscape in other ways.

Since my first trip to Iowa, I have come to love and respect the place; I have learned much of its history, particularly how forces have conspired over the years to produce the landscape that so captivates me now. I have also come to share with Iowans an appreciation of their rich history. I hope that my photographs, at the least, are a meaningful record of that history and the evolution of the contemporary Iowa landscape.

Author: David Ottenstein
Publisher: Prospecta Press
Published: 10/31/2017
Pages: 144
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.70lbs
Size: 10.20h x 11.20w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781632260925

About the Author
Trachtenberg, Alan: - Alan Trachtenberg is Neil Gray, Jr., professor emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University, where he has taught since 1969. His teaching fields include realism and modernism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American Literature. He has taught courses in the history of photography, American fiction and poetry, the relationship between technology and the arts, and major figures in American culture, including both visual and literary artists. His interest in cultural and historical perspectives is evident in his books, which include Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, Shades of Hiawatha, winner of the 2005 Francis Parkman Prize, Reading American Photographs, and The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. He has written widely on American photography and American culture and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.Andelson, Jonathan G.: - Jonathan G. Andelson is Rosenfield Professor of Social Science (Anthropology) at Grinnell College in Iowa. He was born in Chicago, earned his bachelor's degree from Grinnell in 1970 and his master's and doctorate from the University of Michigan, all in anthropology. He joined the faculty at Grinnell in 1974. Since 1971, his main research interest has been the Amana Colonies, a German-American religious community located fifty miles east of Grinnell and one of largest and longest lasting intentional communities in the United States. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on Amana and other intentional communities. His other academic interests include prairie regional studies, Midwestern agriculture, religion, Native Americans, and relations between humans and the environment. He is the founding director of the Grinnell's Center for Prairie Studies, which sponsors interdisciplinary learning on campus and in the Grinnell community focused on the region, sustainability, and notions of place. He is the convener of the Grinnell Area Local Foods Alliance and past president of the Communal Studies Association.Ottenstein, David: - David Ottenstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1960 and grew up in the Northeastern United States, primarily in the central Pennsylvania town of State College. David graduated from Yale University in 1982 with a BA in American Studies with a concentration in photography. He has worked for thirty-five years as a freelance editorial and commercial photographer, specializing in architecture and interiors. For the past eighteen years, David has also pursued fine-art/documentary photography, exploring interiors of abandoned and decaying buildings in the Northeast and the vanishing agrarian landscape of the Midwest. The Western Americana Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has been acquiring David's work on an ongoing basis. His photographs are also represented in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of American Art, Kansas City, MO; the Grinnell College Permanent Collection; the Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, IA; the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; and the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State, among others. David and his wife have two adult children and live in New Haven, Connecticut, a long, but interesting drive from Iowa.