San Francisco photographer comes home to the Great Plains - Nancy Warner exhibits 'Midwestern Farm Places' | Prairie Fire - The Progressive Voice of the Great Plains

By Amber Mohr

Wright Morris wrote in “The Inhabitants,” “In all my life I’ve never seen anything so crowded, so full of something, as the rooms of a vacant house.”

Morris’s words can well describe the vision of San Francisco photographer Nancy Warner, who has dissected and disseminated some of this “crowd of vacancy” to produce a photographic study of farm homes for a new exhibition, “Going Back: Midwestern Farm Places” at the Great Plains Art Museum in Lincoln, Neb.

Warner grew up in Omaha, and spent much of her youth on the farms of aunts and uncles near West Point, Neb. Her mother’s German grandparents arrived in the area around 1865 and built a farmhouse where three generations lived. Today this home is still inhabited on the ground floor by two bachelor cousins. When revisiting the original family homestead in 2001 - their own “Home Place” - long-unused parts of the house, now decaying, struck her as rich with photographic possibilities.

“During a family reunion I ventured upstairs onto the porch and into rooms where no one lives or even enters any more,” said Warner. “I found a treasure trove of photographic possibilities - torn curtains, layers of peeling wallpaper, cracked paint and plaster, worn wood, old clothing hanging in closets, and objects left untouched on shelves.”

Thus began a long-term photographic study of vacant and abandoned farm buildings. With the help of family and friends, she has explored houses in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa. In Iowa, Warner travels the back roads with a sister and a friend who grew up near Wiota in Cass County.

Warner said, “These houses are like old friends I visit from year to year to see how they’re getting along. Some have been completely forgotten, even by the locals, and ignored for years. One or two are being fixed up and will soon have new inhabitants. Some no longer exist.”

Warner’s Aunt Ferny and Uncle Marlin raised a family in a house near Beemer, Neb. In 1995, the couple purchased another farmhouse and moved it next to their own deteriorating one. When relatives removed the siding from the old place, Warner discovered the additional light had opened up new photographic views.

“Old Moeller Place” is the house where her Uncle Marlin grew up, where his mother lived until her death in 1984. Warner began photographing the house in 2003 and has returned each year since then. She started with the interior, not knowing how long it would safe to enter, and has continued with the exterior and other farm buildings. Said Warner, “Each year it’s a bit different as nature does its work. A new hole in the roof can illuminate something I hadn’t noticed before.”

In Nebraska, using her Aunt Ferny’s house as a base, Warner often discovers new places while on the way to another place someone has told her about, especially when she gets lost trying to follow their directions. In recent years, she has begun to use county plat maps to find and track places to photograph. As she expands her working area, she sometimes moves out of those maps into as yet unidentified places.

Warner mused, “Even though I no longer live in the Plains, my connection with the countryside has turned out to be deeper than I ever imagined. There is something about the light, the long shadows, the stands of trees against the flat horizon, and those sturdy structures. These places are part of who I am.”

Warner said she has been attracted again and again to human arrangements that have been left to the forces of nature. As this project has developed, she has expanded imagery to include doors, windows, personal objects, furniture, disintegrating wallpaper and interior walls, interior spaces, exterior walls, farm buildings and nearby cemeteries. “I keep adding new images every year,” said Warner.

You can see Nancy Warner’s gelatin silver prints and color prints in the exhibition, “Going Back: Midwestern Farm Places,” March. 12–April 27 at the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q Street, Lincoln, Neb. She will greet visitors at an opening reception from 5–7 p.m., on April 4, during Lincoln’s monthly First Friday Art Walk. For more information, call 402-472-6220.

“Going Back” is an exhibition produced in conjunction with the 34th Interdisciplinary Great Plains Studies Symposium, “Death, Murder, and Mayhem: Stories of Violence and Healing on the Plains,” April 16–19, cosponsored by the UNL Center for Great Plains Studies and the UNO Department of English at Embassy Suites Omaha - Downtown/Old Market. Warner will be a presenter at the symposium. For more information about the symposium, call 402-472-3082 or see the Web site, www.unl.edu/plains.

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