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Driftless: Photographs from
Iowa
by Danny Wilcox Frazier
with a foreword by Robert Frank
Winner of the third biennial
Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize
Robert Frank, Prize Judge
Ordering Information
Description
Photo Gallery, Interview, and Podcast
Exhibition
Ordering Information
Published by Duke
University Press and CDS Books at the Center for Documentary
Studies
128 pages, 9.25 x 12.25 inches
80 duotone photographs
Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8223-4145-1
$39.95
Driftless is available from
your local bookseller or by ordering directly from Duke
University Press.
To order from Duke
University Press:
http://www.dukeupress.edu
1-888-651-0122 (phone)
1-888-651-0124 (fax)
Description
The Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize
in Photography presents the winning book in this important
series celebrating American photography
“Driftless is Frazier's
document about rural Iowa. His home. . . . Years of working, walking,
photographing, carefully making notes, names, places. . . .
Inhabitants: Farmers, Migrant Workers, their families, Hunters,
Churches, Trailers, Storms, Open Fields, Sunday Night. . . .
Passionate photographs without sentimentality. . . . his work reaches
out: let me tell your story, it is important.
Frazier's work will survive—his book will be the foundation
for more to come. . . ."
—Robert Frank, Prize Judge
“I wanted to explore the lives of the people who stay, who
are casualties of the growing economic divide that separates America’s
rural and metropolitan classes. Having lived in Iowa all my life,
these forgotten communities are part of my own history.”
—Danny Wilcox Frazier
In Driftless, Danny Wilcox
Frazier’s dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing
Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural
economies fail, people and resources are migrating to the coasts
and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier’s
arresting photographs take us into Iowa’s abandoned places
and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue
to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi,
veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as
more recent arrivals, Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer, Latinos
at work in the fields. Frazier's camera finds these newcomers while
it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever;
harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and
surviving.
Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, this collection
of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural Iowa, but it
is also more that that. It shows what is happening in many rural
and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where
people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and
the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived
in Iowa his entire life, Frazier’s photographs are rich in
emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people
who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic
realities remaking rural America.
Danny Wilcox Frazier is a freelance
photographer. Raised in Le Claire, a small Iowa town that sits along
the Mississippi River, he now lives in Iowa City. Frazier has a
master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and he has received
awards from the University of Missouri’s Pictures of the Year
International, including its 2004 Community Awareness Award for
selections of his work from Iowa. He has also received a Stanley
Fellowship, as well as awards from the National Press Photographers
Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. His images
have appeared in such publications as the
New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Mother Jones, U.S. News & World
Report, Life, and Forbes.
Robert Frank
is one of America’s preeminent photographers. His complex
and visionary photographs of postwar America, as well as his later
films and videos, have greatly influenced the work of generations
of artists. Frank’s book The
Americans (1958) brought him international attention and
marked a turning point in photography. The National Gallery of Art
in Washington founded the Robert Frank Collection in 1990. He has
received numerous awards, including an International Photography
Award from the Hasselblad Foundation in Sweden and a Cornell Capa
Award from the International Center of Photography in New York.
See: Announcement
of the third biennial Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman
First Book Prize in Photography Competition
Photo Gallery, Interview, and Podcast
Exhibition
Danny Wilcox Frazier's Driftless:
Photographs from Iowa
Special
Collections Gallery, Perkins Library
West Campus, Duke University
November 5–December 16, 2007
Opening reception and presentation
Rare Book Room, Perkins Library
November 8, 5–7 p.m.
Danny Wilcox Frazier will talk about
his prize-winning photography and sign books at the opening reception.
banner image:
Photograph by Christopher Sims
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