Ten generations ago, at the end of the 18th century, grasslands covered 170 million acres of the North American Continent, from south of the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico, from the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River basin.

Today, less than 4% of this ecosystem remains intact.

Most of the remaining prairie is found in the Flint Hills of central Kansas.

In November of 2019 I moved to the town of Matfield Green, with a population 46 at last count, in the middle of the Flint Hills, to more deeply explore an attraction for this region I’ve had since my youth.

I first saw this region when I was about ten years old. My older brother, who is a falconer, brought me with him to flush rabbits out of the grass for his red-tailed hawk to capture. I was just old enough to be awed by the landscape we were hunting in. I especially remember wondering what it must have been like for the nomadic people who inhabited the region before European settlement. The environment can be extremely harsh, even with the conveniences the industrial revolution has brought to our lives. When the weather is good, it’s easy to imagine how stirring the expanse of the prairie must have been to anyone moving through it on foot.

When I was older, I frequently came here to train and race bicycles. This gave me yet another kind of respect and affection for the environment.

Once I had committed to being a photographer, as a young adult, I began my first attempts to make photographs that sufficiently describe what is here, and discovered that, while it is easy to make pictures that are superficially pleasing, it’s extremely difficult to go beyond that.

My fascination for this challenge has endured for over fifty years now. Throughout the years I was living in Paris, San Francisco, northern Italy and Brooklyn, whenever I returned to the region to visit my family, I always set aside time to explore the Flint Hills.

I have also found myself consistently interested in the science, literature and art that relate to the prairie. Writings by Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Willa Cather, Mark Twain, William Least Heat Moon and Rachel Carson, among others, have informed and affirmed my experience. The photography of Robert Adams, Frank Gohlke and Terry Evans have given me ideas about how to more fully communicate the unique and subtle complexities of this environment. Joe Deal’s last body of work, West and West, has directly led me to explore the idea that it’s possible to make photographs that inspire imagining new ways to relate to the prairie environment in the future. His essay introducing that book of photographs elucidates conclusions my own work has led me to.

My father passed away almost three years ago. After his death, I found it profoundly fulfilling to spend time in the grassland. A few months after his death, an opportunity to move to Matfield Green arose, and I took it, with a great sense of excitement. For the first time in my life, I am living within the subject that I most want to photograph.

I have been living here for about two years at this writing. During the first year I learned my way around the area, became acquainted with many of my new neighbors, began experimenting with pictorial strategies, deepened my research into the science and literature of this region, and observed the passing seasons. This second year has led me to photograph more deeply, to revisit and revise my initial photographs with increasing clarity and purpose. I imagine this process could last a lifetime, but will yield a result appropriate to the scale of the subject after four to five years.

The grassland of the central North American continent has shaped, and been shaped by, the people who have lived within it since at least the end of the last ice age. If humans neglect or abuse the prairie, it soon becomes either inhospitable or changes into something else: maybe a cedar forest, or a dust bowl. Without the space of the Great Plains, our imaginations would be deprived of a potent metaphor for possibility, abundance and resilience. To spend time living in a grassland is to become subliminally connected to the central alchemical idea: As above, so below. The intermingling of forms, the echoes and symmetries of processes that determine and permeate these forms, are constantly apparent. Citizens of the prairie become intimate with otherwise unfathomable temporal and spatial scales, monopolizing both attention and action.

Silt in the flowing water of a creek and the dust cloud in the center of the Milky Way have similar visual appearances and mathematical characteristics. The scope of time and space here force certain conclusions that are as irrefutable and obvious as the force of gravity. Borders and property lines only serve to limit certain economic and cultural activities. Ownership is entirely a cultural construct. Its enforcement requires the constant threat of violence. As Teju Cole has pointed out that “There is no such thing as an innocent photograph of the American landscape.” Ownership implies, in part, a history of genocide and dispossession, death and life.

While mere footprints and remnants of fragile vegetation and aquatic life may remain for hundreds of millions of years, nothing is permanent. Catastrophe is an ever-present possibility, yet certain systems and structures have the resilience to endure extreme duress. Fire precedes and provokes renewal. Plants survive a constant onslaught of grazing animals and insects, extreme weather and fire by establishing roots and rhizomes deep underground. Fifteen feet below and fifteen feet above the horizon line, sunlight and rain meet soil and rock to produce sustenance for a profusion of life. Here, observation reveals the process underlying the substance.

I believe that this remnant of a once oceanic-scale ecosystem is rich with knowledge and metaphor that might, if persuasively and broadly communicated, allow new relationships, new systems of living, to be imaginable. While the pictures I make will serve as a kind of document of what exists here now, I especially hope they will be vehicles for envisioning possibilities for the future.

“It is not half so important to know as to feel … once the emotions have been aroused – a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love – then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning.” -Rachel Carson