| DRIFTLESS
In
an interview with MARY ANNE REDDING, Iowa photographer DANNY WILCOX
FRAZIER reveals the very personal impetus behind his prize-winning photographic
project about the land of his birth..
INTERVIEW
BY MARY ANNE REDDING
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BY WRITING THE POETIC FOREWORD to Driftless,
Robert Frank is doing for Danny Wilcox Frazier what Jack Kerouac did
for him 50 years ago when Kerouac wrote the introduction to The
Americans. As the juror for the 2006 Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman
First Book Prize in Photography, Robert Frank selected Frazier’s
work from 400 entries to receive $3,000 in cash, the publication of
his first book, and inclusion in the biennial prizewinner’s exhibition.
Frank was an outsider and an immigrant when he traveled across America
on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955/56. On the road in a secondhand car,
Frank looked with one skeptical eye and one romantic eye at his new
country. The work he produced was out of focus, coolly removed and all
jangled angles. This displaced itinerant photographer was also moved
by what he saw; there is a gentleness in the gritty melancholy of his
images.
In contrast to Frank, Frazier is an insider. He grew up in Le Claire,
Iowa, a small Mississippi River town. A freelance photographer who now
travels the world, Frazier maintains his American roots. Married with
two young children, he lives in Iowa City, where he has taught at the
University of Iowa. Frazier is, admittedly, influenced by Frank’s
tentative and imperfect imagery. When he first saw The Americans,
he recognized his world: “I was blown away by it. Not necessarily
because I understood the photography completely, but because I had lived
it—it reflected how I felt about the world around me. I connected
to the emotion of the photographs. And I was completely hooked.”
Making pictures in rural Iowa for four years, Frazier knows firsthand
the economic and cultural struggles currently playing out in the Midwest.
The black-and-white images poignantly capture the tension of lives in
transition. There are lots of guns, dead animals, and, similar to Frank’s
imagery, parades and American flags permeate the pictures. The seemingly
careless framing of Frazier’s photographs shares the same poetic
grittiness of Frank’s in that it sets up a subconscious tension
in the viewer.
A BRIEF CONVERSATION WITH DANNY WILCOX FRAZIER:
Mary Anne Redding: I find one of the most intriguing
images in the book to be the image of the toy farmyard. It is the only
image where you are not observing “real life”; rather the
child’s toys are a simulacrum or stand-in for Iowa’s farms.
What were your motivations for taking this image and including it in
the book?
Danny Wilcox Frazier:
Iowa, and all of the Midwest, occupies a sentimental and symbolic part
of our nation’s consciousness. The iconic images of Iowa painted
on canvas or projected on screens show us a place that no longer exists,
if it ever did—a fantasy of tranquility, of simpler times, a settled
landscape full of passive people. Life in Iowa can be punishing. Many
Iowans expend their lives sweating over soil and spilling the blood
of livestock; they endure the hardships associated with a life inextricably
bound to the ups and downs of nature. With my work I am trying to say,
here is real life, dilapidated and unpolished. The photo you mention
is my one reference to that fairy-tale notion of rural life, and like
the plastic figures in the image, it is a fiction.
…
Driftless: Photographs From Iowa. Photographs by Danny Wilcox
Frazier. Foreword by Robert Frank. Duke University Press in association
with the Center for Documentary Studies, Durham, 2007. Hardbound with
printed dustjacket. 120 pp., 80 duotone, 9 × 12 $39.95
Continue
reading this interview by ordering the current issue of photo-eye Booklist.
Order
Driftless: Photographs from Iowa
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