Danny Wilcox Frazier: Driftless

A young girl dreams of becoming a summer festival queen like her older sister, Conesville, 2003 © Danny Wilcox Frazier As a photography student, Danny Wilcox Frazier found great inspiration in Robert Frank’s The Americans. Frank’s fluid and observant photographic eye quickly caught Frazier’s attention but more important than what he saw in the construction of the photographs was what he felt from looking at them. The work was “familiar” to him from the start. Frank’s ability to bring raw emotion to the surface of images is what, undoubtedly, moved Frazier. Jack Kerouac may have put it best when he wrote in the introduction to the seminal book, “[Frank] sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.” I imagine Frazier reading Kerouac’s words and thinking that it couldn’t be more true, that Frank was nothing short of a poet. When, later, Frazier began a project photographing in his home state of Iowa, he decided that embedding emotion into his images of every day rural life would be his primary photographic concern. “During winter in the Midwest,” he writes, “one can drive along endless gravel roads divided by windblown fields of black earth as dark as tar.”

Snow drifts along fencerows, leaving the landscape a harsh contrast of black and white. But the feeling of openness that so defines the Midwest’s rural landscape is being replaced by one of emptiness. This work sheds light on people and places often ignored by mainstream media. As the economies of rural communities across America continue to fail, abandonment is becoming commonplace; these photographs document the human effect of this economic shift.

This transformation from “openness” to “emptiness” is captured in the stark black and white scenes: children acting out fantasies, Amish women playing cards, fishermen along the Mississippi, harvesting, hunting, celebrating, praying and, underneath the surface of every image, human survival. An Old Order Amish family walks to church on Easter Sunday, Washington County, 2005 © Danny Wilcox Frazier It must have been a truly magnificent day when Frazier heard the news that his project, which he had been working on for about three years, had been selected by none other than Frank himself to receive The Center for Documentary Studies’ First Book Prize. Part of what came of this award was a monograph of his own. Driftless: Photographs from Iowa (Duke University Press, 2007) came out with Frank’s words of praise as the forward to the book. I stumbled across a copy of it a few weeks ago in the Harvard Book Store and was drawn to the images before I read anything about Frank’s role in making them known. Frazier’s decision to consider the effects of people and resources migrating from failing rural economies to the coasts and to cities was very interesting in itself but the images made the topic all the more severe. It is “as though the heart of America were being emptied.” And, I suppose, that’s precisely what Frazier’s “poem” is all about. Shooting bottles along the Iowa River, Johnson County, 2003 © Danny Wilcox Frazier See more from Driftless here and, if you’ve got the time, listen to Frazier’s artist talk (43 min.) from Nov. 8, 2007.