Main Street: Towns, Villages, and Hamlets of the Great Plains
The shape of this book is noteworthy: the width is 15.25" and the height is 9.25". This ultrawide landscape format accommodates the photos, which are also long horizontals. Some stretch across one page and occupy only a couple inches vertically; others occupy three pages - a double page spread with a foldout page - with images six inches tall and 45 inches wide. Singer is a photographer who grew up in Edmonton, Canada and although he now lives in Vancouver, Canada, he has driven many miles across the Great Plains to photograph the buildings of the "Main" streets of small towns. An essay by art  historian (and fellow Vancouver resident) Grant Arnold complements the images.“Danny Singer's epic photographic project focuses specifically on the main streets that form the commercial and cultural center of the small towns, villages, and hamlets of the North American great plains?from Saskatchewan and Alberta to Montana and Texas?in which an organic conception of community persists in the face of virtualization and standardization that pervade contemporary life elsewhere.  The specific resonance of Singer's photographs lies in the way he situates the subject matter as a site marked by a continual tension between place and space, between map and itinerary.  To those who know and love the Great Plains, Singer's photographs offer a brilliant visual parallel to one of the most influential representations of the history and culture of the Great Plains: the autobiography Wolf Willow (1955) by Wallance Stegner, who recounts his search for meaning in the time he spent as a small-town boy in south-western Saskatchewan.  Like Stegner before him, Singer's work engages us with a sense of place that continues to reinforce historical moments and a mythological sensibility in our perception of land and life on the Great Plains."