| Jim Dow has been coming to North Dakota since 1981. First, Dow photographed folk art within the environment: sculpture, murals, carvings, and then tourist traps, odd manifestations, surface appearances, and the stuff farmers made in their shops during long winter months. Gradually, his vision expanded to include vernacular architecture: people's places of business, classrooms, workshops, homes, backyards, and hunting lodges, as well as churches and cemeteries and prison yards. Twenty-five years and 300 photographs later, the project coalesces into this North Dakota portrait, a gentle assessment of a time, a land, and its people, and, just outside the picture frame, the weather that mandates endless change.
Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier.
In 2007 the Museum published a full color catalog of Dow's work in North Dakota.
Marking the Land: Jim Dow in North Dakota
Photographs and narrative by Jim Dow
Edited with an essay by Laurel Reuter, Director of the North Dakota Museum of Art
220 pages, 186 color images, hardcover and paperback
Published by the North Dakota Museum of Art in collaboration with the
Center for American Places.
"My interest in photography centers on its capacity for exact description. . . . I use photography to try to record the manifestations of human ingenuity and spirit still remaining in our country's everyday landscape." --Jim Dow
Dow's interest in those places where people enact their everyday rituals, from the barbershop to the baseball park, has guided the path of his photographic career. Dow is concerned with capturing "human ingenuity and spirit" in endangered regional traditions--a barbershop with a heavy patina of town life covering the walls, the opulent time capsule of an old private New York club, the densely packed display of smoking pipes in an English tobacconist shop--all artifacts of a vanishing era.
Dow earned a B.F.A. and a M.F.A. in graphic design and photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1965 and 1968 respectively. An early influence was Walker Evans's seminal book American Photographs (1938). Dow recalls the appeal of Evans's "razor sharp, infinitely detailed, small images of town architecture and people. What stood out was a palpable feeling of loss...pictures that seemingly read like paragraphs, even chapters in one long, complex, rich narrative." Soon after graduate school Dow had the opportunity to work with Evans. He was hired to print his mentor's photographs for a 1972 Museum of Modern Art retrospective.
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