The Garrison Diversion lies across the map of North Dakota like a fallen tower, a symbol of aspirations unfulfilled. The Pick-Sloan Plan during the 1940s and ‘50s embodied the vision of the United States Army Corps of Engineers for development of the upper Missouri River and renewal of the northern plains. Hydroelectric power generated by the big dams across the Missouri was to stimulate industrial development. Water diverted from the great lakes behind the dams was to irrigate the land, making agriculture dependable in a semiarid country.
These were hopes shared and articulated by Bruce Nelson, a promising young writer from Flaxton, North Dakota, who, after sketching the vision of a region revitalized in his remarkable book Land of the Dacotahs (1946), succumbed to tuberculosis, dying in a sanitarium in 1951. The great dams of which he dreamed, including Garrison Dam in the heart of North Dakota, were built by the corps, but the electricity was sent east to power the metropolis. The hoped-for irrigation projects languished and lapsed because of technical and environmental difficulties, along with farmers’ lack of enthusiasm for irrigation. The ditches of the Garrison Diversion yielded crops only of pike and bass.
A generation later, photographer Wayne Gudmundson, describing himself as from “the edge of North Dakota,” revisited the fields of dreams along the Garrison diversion, his exposures tracing the lateral lines of an exhausted vision. He traveled, too, throughout North Dakota, the visionary landscape of another Dakotan, the rural sociologist Carl Kraenzel, from Hebron. Kraenzel, whose masterwork The Great Plains in Transition was published in 1955, saw the northern plains as through the eye of God, or that of a satellite. He discerned the changing patterns on the land, as the remains of rural settlement collapsed into the cities and trade centers. Viewed from his perch above, the landscape came to resemble a slice of tissue on a microscope slide, with nuclei such as Minot, Dickinson, and Jamestown serving as foci in a largely abandoned countryside. Kraenzel urged the people of the plains to get ahead of these developments by planning, consolidating, and adjusting their ways of life to the social cost of space. The changes came more by default than by planning, but they came. Depopulated and stark, the post-rural landscape, too, beckoned the photographer’s eye.
The open land, considered by some a scene of failure, attracted others moved by faith to read its rolling plains and spare buttes as a geography of hope. Kathleen Norris returned to her roots in Lemmon, on the South Dakota line, in search of she knew not quite what, but she found there a life she likened to the asceticism of the desert fathers. As she relates in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993), the sensory deprivation of the plains environment is conducive to spiritual growth.
That may be, and people of the plains indeed are inclined to claim a sort of spiritual superiority on grounds of deprivation, but often this seems like a consolation prize. Many long for times and things past in a way that the word “nostalgia” does not begin to capture. Their sense of the past is palpable, even concrete. The local history museums that spring up with every round of centennials cannot contain it. Inside the Sons of Norway Hall in the once-vital village of Simcoe, Bud Sollid has built a tabletop model of the town as he remembers it from school days in the 1920s and ’30s. Here stand the grain elevators, the Main Street businesses, the gas station. Sandpaper shingles are tacked on little gable roofs with care. All around, lining every wall of the hall, are Bud’s paintings of community events and of ancestral fiords. His visions are of better places and times that are gone forever—for most people, but not for him.
On the farms and in the towns, most people seek to realize lives rather than visions. They hope to marry well, work productively, and have good things for themselves and their children. They make decisions accordingly, adapting both to the changing economic order and to the nature of the land. Many of their decisions are in the direction of consolidation, producing larger and fewer farms, larger and fewer towns, larger and fewer schools, but, reflecting the national model of two offspring per household, smaller and fewer families. At the same time, many—the young women first, followed by the young men—make the most fundamental adaptation to the Great Plains in transition: they depart. Biennially, the region’s politicians, and perennially its pundits, ponder the question of why the young people are leaving, but they do not wish to hear the answer evident and true: “Because they can.” Nor do they wish to hear that older plainspersons who snowbird off to Arizona, taking capital and wisdom with them, or vote down bonds for schools and sewers, are the ones dismantling the country, not the young folks. Personal fulfillment trumps social capital most of the time.
From the chaos of visions and lives crossing and tangling on the twentieth-century plains, at close of century patterns emerged, within which people might find the elusive good life. This is neither the rural idyll of their ancestors nor the urban bustle of their city cousins. It is rather a post-rural landscape inhabited by modern Americans who choose to live where distances are long, climate is rigorous, wildlife is abundant, isolation is eased, individualism is tolerated, and communities are recrystallizing; where the scale of society is small, but that of the landscape is vast. Through the patterns of this life the photographer makes his way, observing “the physical response of people to the considerable forces of the region’s harsh weather” and “enjoying the layering of marks on the landscape made by the forces of man and nature.”
What might such an observer seek in such a landscape, driving the gravel roads, radio off? “The idea of balance . . .,” responds Gudmundson, “when I take the photographs, when I consider them, when I edit them.” There is, too, the balance of content and artistry, the attempt to achieve “documentary photography as fine art.” Exposures are made mostly in the full light of midday, seeking no dramatic effect but rather “a notion of fair representation.” Emotion is tempered, subtle. “Some people will get it,” Wayne says, “and some people won’t.”
The Great Plains are, socioeconomically, a land of boom and bust, and climatically, a land of extremes, but this artist prowls the countryside “hunting for balance.” Wayne lives on the same street he grew up on in Moorhead, Minnesota. His ancestry comprises Norwegian homesteaders of southeastern North Dakota on the maternal side and Icelandic homesteaders of northeastern North Dakota on the paternal side. Whether through ancestral memory, or more likely by being imprinted as a boy during expeditions with his parents across the northern plains, he acquired an affinity for the landscape (“I need to see the horizon,” he says). Born in 1949, Wayne came to know the Great Plains in transition, mostly in the direction of decline. While others were departing the plains, he kept returning, shooting photographs in formats large and lateral, suited to the sense of the place. Unafraid of open spaces, indeed attracted to them, he incorporates “ambiguous spaces that don’t make sense” to offset stark objects on the land.
Balance might seem an impossible dream on the Great Plains, another hopeless vision, but it is not. Nature disdains chaos as much as it does simplicity. Wayne’s “ambiguous spaces,” his subtle emotions, his “layering of marks” are not impositions but rather representations of the complexity that emerges even from a land and a generation that seems always in transition. His images are reminders of patterns of complexity that are more fundamental than short-term change and that remain visible through the dust of passage.
The result is a body of art suitable for export to people everywhere who seek a measured depiction of a region commonly noted only for its extremities. People of the plains can be proud of this representation by a modest, plainspoken exponent of “visual democracy,” uncommon only for his discerning eye. The images possess no agenda other than fair representation and fine art.
This is enough for the extramural public, and it should be enough for the regional public, too. For we people of the plains are weary of visiting firemen with great ideas for improving our country. They say things will be better for us and for the whole country if we redevelop the land for herds of bison, plantations of wind generators, or whatever other fancy that metropolitan America chooses to project across the prairies. God save us from such friends of the plains. Give us instead Wayne Gudmundson, who says, “This is what is here. Look at it.”
Tom Isern: The Vision
The Garrison Diversion lies across the map of North Dakota like a fallen tower, a symbol of aspirations unfulfilled. The Pick-Sloan Plan during the 1940s and ‘50s embodied the vision of the United States Army Corps of Engineers for development of the upper Missouri River and renewal of the northern plains. Hydroelectric power generated by the big dams across the Missouri was to stimulate industrial development. Water diverted from the great lakes behind the dams was to irrigate the land, making agriculture dependable in a semiarid country.
These were hopes shared and articulated by Bruce Nelson, a promising young writer from Flaxton, North Dakota, who, after sketching the vision of a region revitalized in his remarkable book Land of the Dacotahs (1946), succumbed to tuberculosis, dying in a sanitarium in 1951. The great dams of which he dreamed, including Garrison Dam in the heart of North Dakota, were built by the corps, but the electricity was sent east to power the metropolis. The hoped-for irrigation projects languished and lapsed because of technical and environmental difficulties, along with farmers’ lack of enthusiasm for irrigation. The ditches of the Garrison Diversion yielded crops only of pike and bass.
A generation later, photographer Wayne Gudmundson, describing himself as from “the edge of North Dakota,” revisited the fields of dreams along the Garrison diversion, his exposures tracing the lateral lines of an exhausted vision. He traveled, too, throughout North Dakota, the visionary landscape of another Dakotan, the rural sociologist Carl Kraenzel, from Hebron. Kraenzel, whose masterwork The Great Plains in Transition was published in 1955, saw the northern plains as through the eye of God, or that of a satellite. He discerned the changing patterns on the land, as the remains of rural settlement collapsed into the cities and trade centers. Viewed from his perch above, the landscape came to resemble a slice of tissue on a microscope slide, with nuclei such as Minot, Dickinson, and Jamestown serving as foci in a largely abandoned countryside. Kraenzel urged the people of the plains to get ahead of these developments by planning, consolidating, and adjusting their ways of life to the social cost of space. The changes came more by default than by planning, but they came. Depopulated and stark, the post-rural landscape, too, beckoned the photographer’s eye.
The open land, considered by some a scene of failure, attracted others moved by faith to read its rolling plains and spare buttes as a geography of hope. Kathleen Norris returned to her roots in Lemmon, on the South Dakota line, in search of she knew not quite what, but she found there a life she likened to the asceticism of the desert fathers. As she relates in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993), the sensory deprivation of the plains environment is conducive to spiritual growth.
That may be, and people of the plains indeed are inclined to claim a sort of spiritual superiority on grounds of deprivation, but often this seems like a consolation prize. Many long for times and things past in a way that the word “nostalgia” does not begin to capture. Their sense of the past is palpable, even concrete. The local history museums that spring up with every round of centennials cannot contain it. Inside the Sons of Norway Hall in the once-vital village of Simcoe, Bud Sollid has built a tabletop model of the town as he remembers it from school days in the 1920s and ’30s. Here stand the grain elevators, the Main Street businesses, the gas station. Sandpaper shingles are tacked on little gable roofs with care. All around, lining every wall of the hall, are Bud’s paintings of community events and of ancestral fiords. His visions are of better places and times that are gone forever—for most people, but not for him.
On the farms and in the towns, most people seek to realize lives rather than visions. They hope to marry well, work productively, and have good things for themselves and their children. They make decisions accordingly, adapting both to the changing economic order and to the nature of the land. Many of their decisions are in the direction of consolidation, producing larger and fewer farms, larger and fewer towns, larger and fewer schools, but, reflecting the national model of two offspring per household, smaller and fewer families. At the same time, many—the young women first, followed by the young men—make the most fundamental adaptation to the Great Plains in transition: they depart. Biennially, the region’s politicians, and perennially its pundits, ponder the question of why the young people are leaving, but they do not wish to hear the answer evident and true: “Because they can.” Nor do they wish to hear that older plainspersons who snowbird off to Arizona, taking capital and wisdom with them, or vote down bonds for schools and sewers, are the ones dismantling the country, not the young folks. Personal fulfillment trumps social capital most of the time.
From the chaos of visions and lives crossing and tangling on the twentieth-century plains, at close of century patterns emerged, within which people might find the elusive good life. This is neither the rural idyll of their ancestors nor the urban bustle of their city cousins. It is rather a post-rural landscape inhabited by modern Americans who choose to live where distances are long, climate is rigorous, wildlife is abundant, isolation is eased, individualism is tolerated, and communities are recrystallizing; where the scale of society is small, but that of the landscape is vast. Through the patterns of this life the photographer makes his way, observing “the physical response of people to the considerable forces of the region’s harsh weather” and “enjoying the layering of marks on the landscape made by the forces of man and nature.”
What might such an observer seek in such a landscape, driving the gravel roads, radio off? “The idea of balance . . .,” responds Gudmundson, “when I take the photographs, when I consider them, when I edit them.” There is, too, the balance of content and artistry, the attempt to achieve “documentary photography as fine art.” Exposures are made mostly in the full light of midday, seeking no dramatic effect but rather “a notion of fair representation.” Emotion is tempered, subtle. “Some people will get it,” Wayne says, “and some people won’t.”
The Great Plains are, socioeconomically, a land of boom and bust, and climatically, a land of extremes, but this artist prowls the countryside “hunting for balance.” Wayne lives on the same street he grew up on in Moorhead, Minnesota. His ancestry comprises Norwegian homesteaders of southeastern North Dakota on the maternal side and Icelandic homesteaders of northeastern North Dakota on the paternal side. Whether through ancestral memory, or more likely by being imprinted as a boy during expeditions with his parents across the northern plains, he acquired an affinity for the landscape (“I need to see the horizon,” he says). Born in 1949, Wayne came to know the Great Plains in transition, mostly in the direction of decline. While others were departing the plains, he kept returning, shooting photographs in formats large and lateral, suited to the sense of the place. Unafraid of open spaces, indeed attracted to them, he incorporates “ambiguous spaces that don’t make sense” to offset stark objects on the land.
Balance might seem an impossible dream on the Great Plains, another hopeless vision, but it is not. Nature disdains chaos as much as it does simplicity. Wayne’s “ambiguous spaces,” his subtle emotions, his “layering of marks” are not impositions but rather representations of the complexity that emerges even from a land and a generation that seems always in transition. His images are reminders of patterns of complexity that are more fundamental than short-term change and that remain visible through the dust of passage.
The result is a body of art suitable for export to people everywhere who seek a measured depiction of a region commonly noted only for its extremities. People of the plains can be proud of this representation by a modest, plainspoken exponent of “visual democracy,” uncommon only for his discerning eye. The images possess no agenda other than fair representation and fine art.
This is enough for the extramural public, and it should be enough for the regional public, too. For we people of the plains are weary of visiting firemen with great ideas for improving our country. They say things will be better for us and for the whole country if we redevelop the land for herds of bison, plantations of wind generators, or whatever other fancy that metropolitan America chooses to project across the prairies. God save us from such friends of the plains. Give us instead Wayne Gudmundson, who says, “This is what is here. Look at it.”