This column appeared in the Jan. 13 edition of the Ft. Worth Star Telegram. It is reprinted with
permission.
When George Tuck, a native of Dumas, took a sabbatical from the University of Nebraska where he’s a journalism professor, he loaded up his car and camera to photograph the expansive Great Plains of the American heartland.
He drove 10,000 miles in his quest, and everywhere he went he was met by the same resounding, singular question: Why?
To a lot of people, a good photographer, with the right camera and the right lens, could take one picture from the Texas Panhandle to the Canadian border. There would be nothing to block the view except for the occasional fence post or windmill. Maybe a prairie dog mound.
Tuck doesn’t see it that way.
“I always felt the Plains were beautiful,” Tuck said from his office in Lincoln, Neb. “I remember growing up in Dumas. You could stand in one place and watch the sunrise, then turn around and watch it set. There would be nothing between the two.”
You had to work to see the beauty, he said. There was no instantaneous beauty, no breathtaking scenery. There was a starkness that forced you to look closely.
The result of his trip is a 60-photo collection that went on exhibit in January at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon.
The exhibit is appropriately titled “Flat Places.”
The exhibit of black-and-white photos includes shots of the Texas Panhandle and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming. He traveled through he slim sliver of the Oklahoma Panhandle, he said, but nothing there enticed his camera.
In general, Tuck said his eye was caught by the pure agriculture of the prairie. He focused on the endless skies that blanket the flat places. He sighted in on flat parade grounds outside old military forts, bare cottonwood trees reflected in a river next to a Mormon Trail campsite, frost-covered trees against a winter sky and more.
“While I was growing up on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle, I became aware of the subtle differences of light playing across the textured land and the endless variations of the ‘big sky’ that always amaze visitors,” he said. “In 1998 I returned to photograph what I consider my ‘stomping grounds,’ the flatlands that run from Texas through Nebraska.”
Tuck also photographed interesting people of the area.
“I drove around, stopping at the things that struck me as being interesting, curious or whatever,” he said. “I tried to visit as much as possible, but I didn’t drag people out for a picture. These were just people I saw and found interesting.”
Martha Kennedy, immediate past curator of the Great Plains Art Collection at the University of Nebraska, said that Tuck “treats classic themes such as cattle branding, trading horses, cultivating crops and small-town life with an informed and sensitive eye.
“In addition to people typically encountered in the rural plains, he also focuses on less familiar figures — those who drill for oil, for example, or operate grain elevators, or repair railroad tracks in bitter cold. In addition, he has taken time to talk with these people, and his understanding informs his carefully framed images.”
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