with Danny Wilcox Frazier
June 6 – August 4, 2017
Leica Store San Francisco
San Francisco, California
Lost Nation, featuring photographs by documentary photographer Danny Wilcox Frazier, is on view at Leica Store San Francisco from June 6 to August 4, 2017.
Lost Nation is a collection from three series of photographs: Driftless, Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie and A Detroit Requiem, all of which were made over the past fifteen years in marginalized communities across the United States. Known for his long-term approach, Frazier has worked extensively around the globe but shifted his focus onto the emotional landscape of small town America where he is from.
Frazier has photographed the impact of depopulation on communities across the Midwest and Great Plains, including in his home state of Iowa. His photographs do not shy away from the economic struggles many people face throughout rural America due to out-migration. More importantly, though, Frazier’s photographs recognize and celebrate those individuals working to maintain their culture and identity in small towns and rural outposts across the Midwest and Great Plains.
Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, this collection of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural America, but it is also more than that. It shows what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier’s photographs are rich in emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America.
