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.

The historic frontier life portrayed in My Ántonia and Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota.

Marking the Land: Jim Dow in North Dakota consists of approximately fifty photographs from nearly all reaches of the state. The number of photographs can be tailored to fit specific spaces. In addition, there is a full-color catalog available for purchase. Information is as follows:

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.

Jim Dow  
b. 1942 Boston, Massachusetts 
photographer 
American 

"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. 

Dow has taught photography at Harvard, Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and his work has been widely exhibited. Among his series is Corner Shops of Britain (1995), which features facades of small family-run businesses: vitrine-like shop windows showcase goods from candy jars to jellied eels. Another series, "Time Passing" (1984-2004), captures North Dakota "folk art" such as rural road signage, handpainted billboards, and ornate gravestones. 

Back