UNLIKE ANY other country, the USA is familiar to countless people across the World who have never actually been there. We have the overpowering, universal presence of the American movie to thank for that. From cowboys to crime, every genre of cinema has used this immense and divergent country as a backdrop to the narrative.
To the casual viewer, the rural Plains of the United States look like a whole lot of nothing. Technically, the Great Plains lie east of the Rocky Mountains encompassing the states of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming, along with the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where the landscape is usually referred to as the 'prairie'. And that's a lot of prairie.
In the romantic imagination, this is the homeland of the legendary tribes of Native American Indians, the Blackfoot, Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche and the less well known Arikara, Mandan, Pawnee and Wichita. These cultures were destroyed by the invasion of the voracious white men - who in turn got their own comeuppance during the 1920s Great Depression. The infamous Dust Bowl was centred in the Great Plains region, and it was not until the 1950s that the rural Plains became productive - at least in the southern sector, which is over the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast underground natural reservoir. Typically, extensive irrigation is depleting this faster than nature can replenish it and the Plains are being de-populated at an unsustainable rate. Several hundred thousand square miles of the Great Plains have fewer than six persons per square mile, some have fewer than two. There are more than 6,000 ‘ghost towns’ in the State of Kansas alone.
The award winning photographer, Peter Brown, teamed up with Colorado writer, Kent Haruf, to create an affectionate portrait of an area that is still alien to many suburban Americans. The dead flat landscapes are dominated by a horizon that laterally bisects the vision, offering an equal amount of sky to land. It has a magnificent, primeval beauty and its inhabitants have been imbued down the generations with a laconic and taciturn temperament. Haruf’s text, a clever mixture of fact and fiction, gives a flavour of this ‘frontier’ spirit whilst Brown’s images (a first glance appearing repetitive) have a quiet dignity and poignancy, though revealing an emotive subtext upon closer scrutiny. The youth of these vast regions watch satellite TV and visit the sparse movie theatres. The stark contrast between city life and the monotonous, claustrophobic small town existence is there for all to see. On the Plains, the Hollywood Dream is much more than a reality.
Fading clapboard houses, home-made churches, pick-ups and good ole boys are all part of the story. A world where a couple of Nebraskan locals are still proud to be photographed with a cardboard cut-out of neighbour, Texan George W Bush. America is still a land of frontiers inspite of modern communications. This quite excellent, modest tribute to a dying, self sufficient culture evokes the ghosts of the wagon train and the pioneer; the cowboy and the bison, the anonymous life that passes by without notice.
