Midwest Photographers Project: Terry Evans

Rotational Grazing, Chase County, Kansas, November 8, 1996 

About the Exhibition

For the entirety of her career, Terry Evans has been photographing the prairie, from its natural, untouched state to its development, use, abandonment and care. Photographing from both ground and aerial perspectives, she focuses on the issues of specific places and how ecological, economic, agricultural, and cultural patterns physically shape the landscape. As her documentation ranges from responsible land maintenance like cattle rotation and erosion prevention to careless industrial pollution in her aerial pictures Evans’s is consistently interested in the tension between specificity and abstraction. The distanced perspective offers a more wide-reaching and revealing view of the landscape but at the same time a more formally beautiful and detached one. Her images clearly articulate this duality inherent in the relationship between the landscape and those who live in it. Currently, Terry Evans lives and works in Chicago and frequently guest lectures at Columbia College Chicago.

All of the works presented in this exhibition are from the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

-Marci LeBrun, Curatorial Assistant