Dune Book

Growing up as Wright Morris did on the plains of Nebraska, I believe one's eye is educated by the vast grid of east-west and north-south roads, the mostly uninterrupted flat landscape, the big sky, and intense light and shadow. I see this in many of his photographs, like "House in Winter, near Lincoln, Nebraska 1940". Here a weather-beaten, abandoned house stands alone on a slight rise in a snow-covered field under a bright winter sun. The house faces the camera, only one side visible, and in the wall there is one dark, vertical window. A sagging snow fence hugs the edge of the field, and beyond it are the bare branches of a small tree. Above is a hazy scrim of clouds against open sky. The stark simplicity of the picture may strike some as deliberately formalist or minimalist. To the eye of a plainsman, it's familiar and somehow "just right."

The entire collection of photographs in this book, taken mostly in the 1940s, captures a deep stillness, chiefly because they reflect evidence of human activity (houses, schools, cars, store fronts, grain elevators, interiors of houses), but in nearly all of them people are absent. Even in a barbershop, with a variety of current calendars festooning the walls and plants growing in pots and leaning toward the sunlit windows, there is no one. The chairs are empty.

It's easy to oversimplify the intent of these photographs, as Alan Trachtenberg and Ralph Lieberman argue in their essays included in this book. For me, they represent a way of seeing that looks for balance and rest, while acknowledging at the same time that everything must change. The tension between those two things is captured ironically in the last photo, "Juke Box, Southern Indiana 1950," in which a glorious, 1930s-style, lighted juke box stands against a wall under two framed pictures, what looks like a ceramic flying fish, and in the upper left corner a sign reading, "No Dancing."

This book of 80 beautifully reproduced black and white photographs includes a chronology of Wright Morris' career as writer and photographer (1910-1998) and a bibliography of books by and about him. A handsomely designed and elegant book. Worth having.