PhotoBooks Kansas

If you want to grasp the rich complexity of the past, observes environmental historian Donald Worster, you could do worse than spend time on the prairie. Seen from high above, it is an orderly grid of farmland; closer to ground level, it reveals the industriousness of humanity in the making and remaking of the land.

Considered by many to be lacking in inspiration, the prairie is shown by photographer Terry Evans to be a land of varied textures. Evans seeks to have us pay attention to the ways we perceive both the natural and the cultural in this underappreciated landscape, and in this stunning collection of photographs she reads the land for the stories it has to tell.

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Constance Schulz has brought together a diverse array of photographs from three extensive documentary projects: the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information, and Standard Oil of New Jersey. The result is a unique visual record of American life by photographers Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Edwin and Louise Rosskam, and Charles Rotkin. Collectively, their work has immortalized the faces and emotions of FSA-aided farmers and the harsh lives of coal miners, dust-bowl debris and tumbleweeds, a failed bank and a thriving stockyard, locomotives and Mexican-American railroad workers, oil derricks, wheat country, black cavalry troops, and 4-H Club fairs.

In his enlightening introduction, environmental historian Donald Worster provides historical context for the images. Examining state, national, and international events from 1930 to 1950, he explores the agricultural, business, social, political, and environmental climates as well as the composition of the state's population and its inevitable shift away from rural life toward urbanization and industrialization. Schulz also supplies fundamental information on the photographers and the photographic projects.

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If photography is the art of writing with light, then photographer Dan Dancer has written the story of Kansas. In this beautiful volume, he has assembled a portrait of the state in its many different lights--a sunflower field at dawn, a rural Main Street in the eerie, greenish light of a summer storm, a nighttime prairie fire, and a dusty stretch of prairie in the hot light of midday.

In 105 full-color photographs Dancer moves through the four seasons, capturing first the vast, spare grandeur of prairie and sky, then focusing closer, to illuminate the more intimate pieces of the Kansas landscape--the icy fur of a buffalo in winter, a solitary gravestone nearly overgrown by prairie grass. He pursues what he calls "wild space"--uncluttered landscapes that embody a quiet beauty that eludes the hurried and undiscriminating eye. Season by season, he uncovers the uncomplicated, subtle beauty of the state. This revised edition features a new preface, four new seasonal essays, and twelve new photographs replacing those found in the original 1988 edition.

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The variety will surprise you. Because of its central location, Kansas is a meeting ground for North American animals. Six hundred ten species of land animals--birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians--live in or pass through Kansas. Boreal animals from the colder northern climes traverse the state on their way south; western creatures migrate east from the Rockies or reside in our arid grasslands; southern wildlife pushes north into Kansas on its way back from winter quarters or settles permanently in our Red Hills; and eastern species invade our deciduous forests.

In Kansas Wildlife four of the state's best wildlife photographers combine 130 photographs to create a colorful sampler of the state's biodiversity--from delicate Cricket Frogs to ponderous Bison, from stately Great Blue Herons to madcap Chickadees, from cautious Ornate Box Turtles to high-strung Prairie Rattlesnakes.

Naturalist Joe Collins provides detailed figure captions full of little-known information about the habits and habitats of Kansas creatures. Did you know, for example, that the Eastern Yellowbelly Racer, a fast and aggressive snake, sometimes follows people who enter its territory during the spring courting season? Have you heard the high-pitched howl of the Northern Grasshopper Mouse, a predatory mouse that occasionally stands on its hind feet and howls like a miniature wolf? Did you know that hummingbirds, the only birds that can fly backwards, must refuel every ten to fifteen minutes? Did you realize, in your wildest dreams, that there are often 750 Prairie Ringneck Snakes to the acre?

"Look for these animals the next time you stroll the natural places of Kansas," Collins writes. "I think the variety will surprise you as much as it surprised me on my first Kansas snake hunt twenty years ago, and still does today."

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This luminous volume offers a rich feast of words and images depicting nature's unexpected beauty in Kansas. With a keen ecological sense, O. J. Reichman and Steve Mulligan present a breathtaking reminder of the state's remarkable natural heritage.

Featured in these pages are the sunlit bluffs of the Arikaree River, the Red Hills beneath a winter sky, the meandering Chikaskia River, Castle Rock, Pillsbury Crossing, Keyhole Arch in Monument Rocks National Landmark, Breidenthal Reserve's oak and hickory forests, sweeping waves of Big Bluestem and spring fires on Konza Prairie, Cimarron National Grasslands, the Mill Creek waterfall, Shermerhorn Cave, the wetlands of Cheyenne Bottoms, and a vast array of blooming phlox, columbine, larkspur, butterfly milkweed, dogwood, and wild rose. More than any previous work, Living Landscapes of Kansas captures the essence of a state alive with natural beauty.

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Book of postcards

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