Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1987
Abstract
Wright Morris is better known as a writer than as a photographer, but his photographs of Nebraska deserve more attention than they have received. Morris's work in the 1930s never achieved the fame of the Farm Security Administration photographs. And he himself cut short his photographic work of the 1940s when he and his publishers became frustrated with the expense and the aesthetic strain of his early books' photo-text format. But Morris's images of a premodern Nebraska, taken from the 1930s to the early 1950s, form an impressive body of work that is especially acute for its rendering of a world caught between change and changelessness. Morris's photographs deserve serious attention because in identifying this tension they mark a significant stage in twentieth-century America's imaginative response to the changes set in motion by industrialization and urbanization.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 7:1 (Winter 1987). Copyright © 1987 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.