Review of \u3ci\u3eHigh Plains Farm\u3c/i\u3e Photographs and text by Paula Chamlee

The Great Plains is a unique, difficult landscape, and those who live here have to learn to adapt to it. Paula Chamlee grew up on a farm on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle near Adrian. She left less than a month after high school graduation and became a fine art photographer. Three decades later, she returned to photograph the farm while my parents are still active. What she has produced is a beautiful book that quietly tells the story of lives lived on the edge of possibility. Yet, for me, the story is incomplete. If you have traveled at all on the High Plains, you know this farmstead. Chamlee\u27s parents grew up during the Great Depression and have faced almost perennial droughts since. Since the Ogalalla aquifer is too deep to irrigate from, their farm is a menagerie of almost- worn-out equipment and out buildings that haven\u27t known paint for a decade. As Chamlee says, the credo has always been: \u27Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.\u27\u27\u27 To survive by farming dry land on the High Plains is no small feat. Chamlee says it was important to photograph her home place while the extraordinary energy and spirit of their [her parents\u27] presence fills this home place, but you couldn\u27t tell that from the selection of photographs she presents. Only three of the eighty photos show her parents\u27 faces, two their backs at work, two more their hands. The rest are walls, lumber, rusting equipment, caps hanging on hooks rather than worn on heads. Eight photographs are of old vehicles, and at least ten are of weathered wood. The people-her parents, for heaven\u27s sake-are absolutely silent in the book, almost as if they have moved on already, leaving only relics and heirlooms. The viewer is forced to become an archeologist, to divine the meanings of these people\u27s lives through artifacts alone

A panoramic view Ft. Atkinson barracks room.

A panoramic view of the reconstructed interior of a Ft. Atkinson barracks room

A panoramic view of the reconstructed interior of the Ft. Atkinson

A panoramic view of the reconstructed interior of the Ft. Atkinson Powder Magazine, originally built out of bricks from the local brickyard

A reconstruction of the Council House at Fort Atkinson

A reconstruction of the Council House at Fort Atkinson where the treaty between the Pawnee and the Mexicans was negotiated