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Fire.
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AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 7, 2003
128
pages
68 color photographs
10 x 10 trim size
0-8223-3208-6
$39.95
A Lyndhurst Book Published by Duke University Press and the Center for Documentary Studies.
On Fire is available from your local bookseller or by ordering directly from Duke University Press.
To
order from Duke University Press:
http://www.dukeupress.edu
1-888-651-0122 (phone)
1-888-651-0124 (fax)
The Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography presents the Inaugural book in this major new series celebrating American photography
Larry Schwarm's photographs of fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later photographer trying to do better. His pictures convince us that seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious person's life.
The photographer engages our attention first by heightening our amazement at the sensuality of fire. Most of us have enjoyed looking into a fireplace, but few of us have observed as well as he the astonishing shapes and colors and fluidity of fire. He is so skilled in recording its appearance that occasionally we almost hear the burning and feel the warmth.
What do the photographs mean? We recoil from that question in fear that the pictures might wither to abstraction, but their sensuality saves them. In any case we all do look for meaning in life and thus in art, its reflection. How could we not, since the two most evident characteristics of life, beauty and suffering, see a contraction that undermines meaning, or at least obscures it.
The prairie has often been compared to a seascape made of earth and air. Schwarm's pictures add to that the missing fourth element, helping us to understand.
–Robert
Adams, from the Introduction
The North American tallgrass prairie once covered the eastern Great Plains, stretching from Texas to Canada and covering nearly 152 million acres. Agricultural and urban development have taken their toll, and today much of that broken into small, isolated parcels. My photographs are made on the largest remaining expanse of the tallgrass prairie, the Flint Hills in east-central Kansas.
Fire is essential to the prairie ecosystem. Without it, the prairie would have grown into scrub forest. Before human habitation, unbroken expanses of grasses as tall as eight-feet high would catch on fire and burn for hundred of miles. Native Americans set fires to entice bison to the new grass that replaced the burned. European settlers adapted the practice and burned to encourage new growth for their cattle, as well as to kill invasive trees and weeds. What started as a natural phenomenon became an annual event controlled by people. The metaphor is obvious–without destruction there is no rebirth; for every act there is an opposing one.
The work in this book represents twelve years of photographing the controlled burning that occurs every spring in the Flint Hills. I never intended to document the fires in the strictest sense of the word, but rather to capture every essence of them, from calm and lyrical to angry and raging. I discovered in the fires' subtleties and abstractions a spirituality akin to what Mark Rothko expressed in his color-field paintings. These qualities, both quiet and other-worldly, form what I see as the sublime and mystical character of the burning landscape, where images are at once both sensous and menacing.
–Larry Schwarm, from the Afterword
Larry Schwarm's photographs have been exhibited widely across the United States over the past ten years, both in solo and group shows. They have appeared in various publications, including An American Century of Photography: From Dry Plate to Digital, Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography, Harper's Magazine, and Blind Spot. His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Beach Museum of Art (Manhattan, Kansas), and Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence, Kansas), and is included in the PaineWebber Landscape and Hallmark Photographic Collections. Larry Schwarm is Professor of Art at Emporia State University in Kansas, where he teaches photography.
Robert Adams is one of America's preeminent landscape photographers whose work has been published, exhibited, and collected throughout the world. His books of photographs include From the Missouri West and Perfect Times, Perfect Places and his writings on photography are available in such books as Beauty in Photography and Why People Photograph. Robert Adams was the Inaugural Judge for the Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.
The Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography is open to American photographers who use their cameras for creative exploration, whether it be of places, people, or communities; of the natural or social world; of beauty at large or the lack of it; of objective or subjective realities.
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