Prairiescapes

Photographs

Author: Larry Kanfer

Foreword by Walter L. Creese

Capturing the quiet beauty of central Illinois in more than one hundred color and black-and-white photographs

Cloth – $34.95

978-0-252-01482-6

Publication Date

Cloth: 01/01/1987

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About the Book

A former student of architecture at the University of Illinois, Larry Kanfer has developed a kinship with the rural regions of the Prairie State. He draws upon a rich background in art, design, and travel to focus on the unique qualities of the midwesten landscape, exhibiting an unusual sensitivity to composition, color, texture, and light. Kanfer isolates singular images--a solitary barn, a rural mailbox atop a roadside post, a red stop sign caught in the nighttime glare of a car's headlight, cornflower blossoms springing from a ditch--as well as broader prairie scenes.

About the Author

Larry Kanfer is an award-winning photographic artist who operates galleries in Champaign, Illinois, and online at www.kanfer.com. His original artwork is featured in public and private collections nationally. Walter L. Creese is chairman of the history and preservation department of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of The Crowning of the American Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and Their Buildings

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Reviews

Blurbs

"Through the eyes of Larry Kanfer one sees the many moods of the prairie: the romantic, the mystical, the dramatic. His book graphically reinforces what the intense and loving observer has already experiences and will surprise the prairie except from the superhighways."--Billy Morrow Jackson, professor of art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Kanfer evokes the special character of the prairie landscape with skill and sensitivity - the endless horizons, the enormous skies, the small scale of humanity and its creations, the enormous changes in atmospheric conditions which lead to subtle shifts in color and scale. . . . The color is superb, the sense of texture particularly effective. Kanfer is not one of those black-and-white gritty documentary photographers who delight in the banal, the obvious, the split-second vision which we see so often. His work stimulates thought and indeed seems itself to be a kind of meditation."--Allen S. Weller, professor emeritus of art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, former director of the Krannert Art Museum, and author of The Joys and Sorrows of Recent American Art