Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)
*Starred Review* The first retrospective volume of Terry Evans’ work establishes beyond question her standing as a major American photographer. For four decades she has been exploring midwestern lives and landscapes. Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Evans was given her first camera at age four, and her parents ran a portrait photography studio. Yet drawing and painting were Evans’ great passions, until she moved to Kansas and found that the camera was her portal to the world. Evans took crisp and intimate documentary portraits of rural Kansans in the style of her hero, Dorothea Lange, then fell in love with the “cosmic order” of the prairie after environmentalist Wes Jackson asked her to take photographs as part of a survey of prairie grasses. She took her first flight over the majestic prairie in 1980 and began creating the breathtaking aerial compositions for which she is known best, photographing prairies from Texas to Canada, Chicago, mountaintop removal coal mining, melting glaciers in Greenland, and the oil and gas boom in North Dakota. “A Personal Bibliography” charts the depth of her inquiries, and the salient essays that accompany the book’s exceptionally sharp and saturated plates elucidate the “central tension in her work: the play between fact-gathering and personal expression.” --Donna Seaman