Such recent exhibitions have highlighted works
by Andrew Borowiec of Akron, Ohio in which the
photographer formalizes in black and white pa-
noramic studies the industrial landscape—showing
the ever-increasing proliferation of American refi-
neries and their mass production of power and
consumer goods. Borowiec’s abstract yet complex
compositions bring to mind the antecedent works
by Sheeler at the Ford River Rouge plant.
In his photographs of institutional spaces, Chi-
cago police officer and photographer Scott Fortino
investigates the psychological concept of confine-
ment and protection. Observed with an almost
scientific formality, Fortino’s saturated colored
images of Chicago public school classrooms and
police stations’ holding cells are formally beautiful,
suggestive of their methodical precision yet absent
of human narrative.
Equally compelling are the images exhibited to-
gether by Midwest landscape photographers, Tom
Bamberger, Paul J. Clark, and Terry Evans. Milwau-
kee-based Tom Bamberger’s digitally manipulated
work challenges the viewer to reconsider the natural
and man-made alternations that occur in many famil-
iar landscapes. Bamberger’s digitally created panor-
amas obsessively accentuate the horizontality of the
Midwestern prairie. His process involved extending
and repeating the information from a single negative
to create a new landscape reality.
Initially, the elongated images appear to be an
exercise to see how far the horizon line can be
convincingly extended. Attracted to inherently
repetitious scenery—housing developments, farm-
land, highways, vineyards—Bamberger creates a
virtual landscape by scanning information from
35 mm negatives and assembling it according to
his own system of erasure and replication. Each
view is, in fact, a compilation of images, some re-
peated, some not.
Bamberger likens the process to cultivating a
virus, explaining that, ‘‘in either a computer or a
Petri dish, something reproduces itself until it
reaches a critical mass where you can see it with
greater clarity’’ (Brochure from the Museum of Con-
temporary Photography). As the landscapes grow
and the repetition becomes more easily identifiable,
his process becomes more complex. How natural or
artificial are these images when repetition is intrinsic
to these subjects to begin with? By blurring the line
between his digital alterations and the existing shape
of the landscape, Bamberger questions the nature of
repetition, arguing that there is little difference
between, for example, DNA’s reproductive process
in a forest or field and the computer cloning that his
work depends on.
Paul J. Clark takes a much closer look at nature
in his images of urban and suburban community
gardens. Revisiting the same places and capturing
the changing connection between nature and man,
Clark draws attention to the patterns and rhythms
that naturally occur in these spaces. Terry Evans
distances herself from her subject in order to
explore it more deeply.
Since 1978, the subject of the Midwest prairie
has engaged photographer Terry Evans, a former
resident of Salina, Kansas. Evans turned to the
prairie when some friends asked her to photograph
some survey work they were doing on a prairie near
Salina. Initially, she began taking ‘‘portraits’’ of the
different forms of prairie grasses and flowers,
photographing the complex patterns of the differ-
ent prairie specimens from a waist-high distance
from the ground. Evans found it impossible to
discern any visual order or pattern of organization
as she observed the ground, but she was convinced
that a pattern must be there.
After eight years of photographing fragmentary
but still extant unspoiled prairie, Evans felt she had
exhausted the limits of her vision. It was not until
she saw some aerial photographs of abandoned
bomb test sites, that she realized with the aid of
aeronautics she could expand her vision to include
the rest of the prairie. Since then, Evans has photo-
graphed the Midwest prairie from its northern most
boundaries south to Texas, capturing spectacular
views of the pristine prairie and likewise—the
‘‘inhabited prairie’’ that which showed man’s
mark on the land.
Evans’ engagement with the ‘‘inhabited’’ Mid-
west prairie lands constitutes a 1995 collaboration
with the U.S. Forest Service and Openlands Project.
She documented the land surrounding the Joliet
Arsenal, southwest of Chicago, land formerly occu-
pied by the world’s largest munitions plant before its
restoration into a national prairie park, the center-
piece of a 40,000 acres ecosystem that links other
nearby wildlife refuges. Evans’ photographic re-
cords culminated in her 1998 book,Disarming the
Prairie.A second photographic book project,The
Inhabited Prairie, illustrates specific places and the
way man lives on the prairie. Shown are multiple
uses of the prairie land in a 25-mile radius around
Salina, Kansas, including the National Guard’s
Smoky Hill Weapons Range. Evans’ aerial photo-
graphs document responsible land use and mainte-
nance, such as terraced plowing and cattle rotationUNITED STATES: THE MIDWEST, PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE