This past summer I returned to my grandparents hometown of Alta, IA, for the first time in almost a decade, and for the first time since I took up photography. I was struck immediately by the space and vastness of the land. When you’ve spent your whole life in cities and currently live in a 900 square-foot apartment, space is a precious commodity. But there’s no shortage of it in Alta or its surrounding municipalities in Buena Vista County. In town, the flag-draped, ranch-style homes sprawl onto fenceless yards and quiet streets. On the edge of town, soy and corn stretch endlessly towards the horizon, broken only by silos, barns, windmills, and windbreaks. The state roads undulate effortlessly through the fertile fields, without crease or intent.
And there is an innate, embedded sense of history that permeates and temporally dichotomizes both the landscape and the culture of the town. Old weed-bound tractors rest peacefully within throwing distance of half-million-dollar combines; the bones of old barns sit in the shadows of gleaming grain elevators; gleaming F-350's pull up to slowly-atrophying 100-year-old churches on Sunday morning. But there is no conflict in the contrast, only gentle and unassuming reminders of the past.
These were my initial impressions and jumping-off points for this little project. I fear that any additional words might narrow the visual narrative in unintended ways, so I leave you here, at the gates of Alta, the town of my mother's family, a town of less than 2,000 in the northwest corner of Iowa...
