IOWA

by Nancy Rexroth

In the early 1970s, Nancy Rexroth began photographing the rural landscapes, children, white frame houses, and domestic interiors of southeastern Ohio with a plastic toy camera called the Diana. Working with the camera’s properties of soft focus and vignetting, and further manipulating the photographs by deliberately blurring or sometimes overlaying them, Rexroth created dreamlike, poetic images of “my own private landscape, a state of mind.” She called this state IOWA because the photographs seemed to reference her childhood summer visits to relatives in Iowa. Rexroth self-published her evocative images in 1977 in the book IOWA , and the photographic community responded immediately and strongly to the work. Aperture published a portfolio of IOWA images in a special issue, The Snapshot , alongside the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Emmet Gowin. The International Center for Photography, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution included IOWA images in group exhibitions. Forty years after its original publication, IOWA has become a classic of fine art photography, a renowned demonstration of Rexroth’s ability to fashion a world of surprising aesthetic possibilities using a simple, low-tech dollar camera. Long out of print and highly prized by photographers and photobook collectors, IOWA is now available in a hardcover edition that includes twenty-two previously unpublished images. Accompanying the photographs are a new foreword by Magnum photographer and book maker Alec Soth and an essay by internationally acclaimed curator Anne Wilkes Tucker, who affirms the continuing power and importance of IOWA within the photobook genre. New postscripts by Nancy Rexroth and Mark L. Power, who wrote the essay in the first edition, complete the volume.

Genres: Photography

168 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 2017

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is the seeing of a thing, the memory of the thing, the dream of it, the photographing of it. Nancy Rexroth's seminal, in and out of print classic fuses all of these things; a portrait of an emotional landscape of a place that is mostly not the state of Iowa, but the state of mind of IOWA. Having myself been drawn to the etherial and tawdry delights of the toy Diana camera, I know the language, the weird halos, the chasing of focus and exposure, the reveling in chance and disarray. For decades this book has been an open secret, a map without a legend. But the photos are so evocative and nuanced and felt that it's a hard book to put down or forget and not immediately want to recommend and revisit. In short, a classic.

[Tony Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly impressive and cohesive work from an inspirational artist. Just dreamy and wonderful, original Diana camera work. Each photo can take you into a different world.