This Place, These People

The photographs and the words so beautifully preserved here evoke powerful-and indeed painful-memories of the homes left behind when millions of rural Americans packed up, said good-bye to all they had known, and relocated to the nation's cities and suburbs. The memory of that transition continues for many of us, tearing at our hearts. -- Robert Wuthnow, author of Remaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s This Place, These People makes the forgotten and the ordinary sacred. The photos are breathtaking; the interviews as homey and nourishing as rice and beans. Every picture and quotation is revelatory and poignant. I'd like to give this book to almost everyone I know. -- Mary Pipher, author of The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture This marvelous book offers us a glimpse of the ghost of the Great Plains as it makes a last appearance. We ought to be immensely grateful to David Stark and Nancy Warner for inviting us to their deeply moving seance. -- Ted Kooser, former U.S. Poet Laureate These resonant photographs and recollections evoke a world almost gone from American life. They are as filled with time as old monuments, and as moving. -- Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Warner's exquisite and haunting images are like memory itself: fragments that the imagination weaves together into a meaningful whole. -- Martha Casanave, photographer

A photographic and vernacular portrait of disappearing midwestern farm places.The numbers of farms and farmers on the Great Plains are dwindling. Disappearing even faster are the farm places-the houses, barns, and outbuildings that made the rural landscape a place of habitation. Nancy Warner's photographs tell the stories of buildings that were once loved yet have now been abandoned. Her evocative images are juxtaposed with the voices of Nebraska farm people, lovingly recorded by sociologist David Stark. These plainspoken recollections tell of a way of life that continues to evolve in the face of wrenching change. Warner's spare, formal photographs invite readers to listen to the cadences and tough-minded humor of everyday speech in the Great Plains. Stark's afterword grounds the project in the historical relationship between people and their land. In the tradition of Wright Morris, this combination of words and images is both art and document, evoking memories, emotions, and questions for anyone with rural American roots.