Laura McPhee, American (b. 1958). Mattie with a Bourbon Red Turkey, Lavery Ranch, Custer County, Idaho, November 2004. Series title: River of
No Return. Chromogenic print, 37 9/16 x 30 1/8 inches (95.41 x 76.52 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of the Hall Family Foundation, 2013.20.2. © 2024 Laura McPhee
Ghostly apparitions, murder ballads, rodeos, county fairs, praise dancers, turkey whisperers, elk hunters, nomadic wanderers, vast mountain ranges, foreboding swimming holes and endless expanses of wild prairie. The ten artists featured in the exhibition Strange and Familiar Places explore this eclectic variety of subjects, weaving together influences from folklore, music, literature, history and lived experience to tell compelling stories about people and communities shaped by the land they inhabit. Their intimate photographs focus on rural subjects in the American West, Midwest, South and Western United States, often challenging our preconceptions of these regions.
Several artists combine landscape and portraiture to tell their stories, mixing staged images with a documentary-style approach. In their exploration of an Ozark legend, Lara Shipley and Antone Dolezal became fascinated by the story of the Spook Light, an otherworldly illumination said to appear at the end of a dark, secluded road and believed by many to herald the devil incarnate. Their photographs consider this folk tale as a metaphor for grappling with life’s uncertainties in this unique culture. For her series Dark Waters, Kristine Potter took inspiration from 19th-century murder ballads. These folk songs, characterized by tales of betrayal and jealousy, often center around the violent death of a woman. Set in the American South, Potter poses women as the tragic heroines of these ballads, as if risen from the dead to haunt the landscape and the men who ended their lives.
Rahim Fortune centers his photographs on Black American traditions in the American South and in his home state of Texas, using the language of black and white photography, in his words, “to interrogate our proximity to history, and the legacy of the people who come before us.” RaMell Ross, a photographer and filmmaker (he directed the 2024 award-winning film Nickel Boys), applies a cinematic sensibility to his photographs of Hale County, Alabama, a place, in his words, where “the myth of Blackness is entangled at the root of the South’s mythology.”
Elise Kirk, a native Missourian who left her rural hometown for many years before returning to teach at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, explores the tension between putting down roots and pulling up stakes in her series Mid—. “I think that’s a tension we all grapple with,” Kirk notes, “regardless of where we are from.” Celebrated photographer Terry Evans, who hails from Kansas City, finds the natural prairie near Salina, Kansas, a region she has photographed since the late 1970s, to be an endless source of inspiration. Her latest landscape views are composite images that reference time’s passage, which Evans connects to her own life and career. “I think about time in my life now,” she notes, “and as I look back at my work over the last fifty years, it all looks like a continuum.”
For his series Sons of the Living, Austin-based photographer Bryan Schutmaat creates open-ended narratives that bring together portraits of hardscrabble drifters with unsparing landscape views of the American Southwest, a region visibly scarred by environmental destruction. As Schutmaat states: “I wanted the desert to serve as a backdrop for wanderers who could have been out of the book of Exodus.” Laura McPhee photographed a different Western region to consider “our relationship to time, place, and mortality” for her series River of No Return, set in Idaho’s sparsely populated Sawtooth Valley. McPhee, who hails from the urban Northeast, spent time in this region, and grew to appreciate the relationship between the Valley’s small communities and the land they inhabit through ranching, fishing, hunting, and conservation effort. Holly Lynton was similarly drawn to photograph traditional framing and agricultural methods practiced by families in rural communities throughout the United States for her series Bare Handed. Her intimate, gestural portraits explore the relationship between hard labor and spirituality as it manifests through an elemental connection between humans, animals, and the land. “I try to make visceral photographs,” notes Lynton, “as if you can feel that you are there.”
Though different in their technique and approach, the artists featured in this exhibition deepen and enrich our understanding of place by emphasizing the humanity of their subjects. Focusing on communities and regions often overlooked or misrepresented by the mainstream media, their photographs challenge us to slow down, and consider the cultural tapestry of influences that shape our perceptions of these strange and familiar places.
Strange and Familiar Places will be on view at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from February 1 to July 20, 2025. Organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, with generous support provided by the Hall Family Foundation.
–April M. Watson, Senior Curator, Photography, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
