Jim Dow, a well-loved professor of mine at the Museum School, has just come out with a new book.

Marking the Land recounts photographs made as far back as 1981 when Jim was invited by the North Dakota Museum of Art to photograph the landscape. He focused on the “environmental folk art—that is, architecture, signage, sculpture, painting, grave markings, working shops, the stuff made by farmers during idle winter months, and all else that decorates the land.”

In the late 1990s while working on his American baseball park panoramas, Jim returned to North Dakota with another grant from the museum.

From a distance of twenty years, Dow saw the larger themes harbored within the photos: change, the passing of time, the innate creativity demanded of people who live in rural or remote places, and the way humans live lightly on the land and then move on, leaving marks that soon fade away.

The book opens with views of North Dakota, twelve gigantic murals painted on the walls of the State Prison yard half-a-century ago by Charles Oliver. Dow photographed them in their crumbling state just before they were torn down. He closes with Whitey’s Wonder Bar in East Grand Forks—before and after the 1997 flood. With his 8 x 10 large-format camera, he recorded groups of “dinosaurs” or thrashing machines arranged on the hills near Amidon. The World’s Largest Holstein Cow near New Salem. Henry Luehr’s Bull from Buchanan. The hand-forged iron crosses made by Germans from Russia marking the graves near Hague and Zeeland. Sign for Barlow Meats in Devils Lake. Alex Pauluck’s Shop in Belfield. Sig Jagelski’s Jugtown near Auburn. Artist Walter Piehl’s painting studio, his drawing classroom at Minot State, and his Blue Rider Bar. The Goose River Lutheran Church before it burned as well as the State’s grand churches in Warsaw. Dazey, and Strasburg, Eccentric architecture such as the Kite Café in Michigan. Monuments and follies intermingle with one-offs and life-time passions in Jim Dow’s masterpiece, Marking the Land.

Blue Rider Bar (from “Marking the Land”)
© Jim Dow

Emmit Gowin writes about the book,

Jim Dow’s photographs of North Dakota are at the heart of a very important life’s work in photography, and these images eloquently summarize a deeply imaginative people and an astonishing landscape nearly invisible from our two coasts. Marking the Land is a work of grandeur and intimacy, and it is the kind of work that can truly change what we know and what we feel.

As a side note, on August 9 Jim will be on Hear it Now discussing this work – the podcast, I assume, will be available shortly after.