Disarming the Prairie

by Terry Evans

In Disarming the Prairie, noted landscape photographer Terry Evans offers haunting and hopeful images of the impact of America's military-industrial complex on the environment and the transformation of a former military base into a unique nature preserve and public recreation area. Located 40 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, the Joliet Army Arsenal was once the world's largest TNT factory. Wartime security and safety measures demanded that the Joliet installation be surrounded by 19,000 acres of open lands -- farmlands, meadows, wetlands, and forest. Abandoned by the post-Cold War era military, the munitions plant and its vast prewar farmland and wilderness setting now has a new purpose. Inspired by the vision and efforts of environmentalists, preservationists, and Chicago-area residents, the federal government in 1997 transferred the land from the Department of the Army to the U.S. Forest Service and created Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. In her photographs of the Midewin Prairie, Terry Evans captures this moment of transformation, contrasting the decayed monuments of twentieth-century warfare with the pastoral beauty and historic structures preserved within the boundaries of the former installation. Through her evocative images of the arsenal (abandoned bunkers, disused railway tracks, crumbling factory buildings and offices) and the countryside around the base (tallgrass prairie, a blackbird's nest, grazing cattle, a meandering creek, as well as a prehistoric burial mound and a Civil War-era fieldstone fence), Evans explores one of this country's most troubling and least understood legacies -- the militarization of the American landscape. In his informative introduction, Tony Hiss notes that installations similar to the Joliet Arsenal were built across the United States during the Second World War and at the height of the Cold War, eventually occupying 30 million acres of land. Approximately 20 million acres (an area the size of Austria) remain under military control today, and the debate over what to do with the sprawling munitions factories for which the post-Cold War military has no further use has begun in earnest. Joliet's transformation to Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie will serve as a model for future conversion of military lands into civilian use, and Terry Evans's photographic record of this change provides hope that renewal is possible.

Hardcover

First published August 1, 1998

About the author

Terry Evans has photographed the prairies and plains of North America and the urban prairie of Chicago. Combining both aerial and ground photography, she delves into the intricate and complex relationships between land and people. Her work explores the virgin prairie, working steel mills, Greenland ice sheets, a small town in the Kansas Flint Hills, the oil boom in North Dakota, and Ft. Worth’s Trinity River and the people who use it, and now petcoke in Southeast Chicago.

Explorations of the effects of land use on local people have led her to use her work as a means of advocacy for local people’s rights and for climate change awareness. She joins the people of Southeast Chicago who are fighting petcoke effects from Koch brothers owned petcoke storage on the banks of the Calumet River in the midst of a residential neighborhood.

Evans has exhibited widely including one-person shows at the Chicago Art Institute, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History ,The Field Museum of Natural History, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Amon Carter Museum of Art

Evans is a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman award. Her work is in museum collections including the Chicago Art Institute, Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of Art and many other museum collections.

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Less visceral than her stunning, eerier black-and-white aerial photos of Kansas bombing ranges and the oddly beautiful scars left on the Plains by farming and ranching, but a pioneering work here. Terry Evans documents the abandoned Joliet Army Ammunitions Plant 40 miles southwest of Chicago, a huge industrial complex built during the 1940s where many of the bombs dropped on Germany, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were manufactured by a workforce of mostly women and Jamaican immigrants. The Joliet plant was shut down at the end of the Cold War and the large "prairie" buffer zone surrounding it got turned over to the Forest Service. Consequently, much of the land here was never (or only lightly) tilled. Since the 1990s, when Evans photographed at the site, the land (partially poisoned by chemicals used in the production of TNT) has been slowly coaxed back into life as the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie -- until recently, the most ambitious prairie restoration east of the Mississippi.

Evans' books are as relevant as ever, as big parts of the Midwest are as much post-agricultural today as Detroit is post-industrial. Her look into what became Midewin was made at a unique moment, before many of the old arsenal buildings were bulldozed and before much of the surrounding land went back into use as landfills and industrial zones as the Chicago 'burbs ooze outward. To its credit, Disarming the Prairie is no sentimental "nature" book, and Evans is no Ken Burns/fantasy calendar photog, though it's clear that romantic evocations of what the prairie "should be" as we struggle to tip back from the consumerist brink are driving some of the best environmental work in the Midwest, artistic and otherwise.

Evans' color medium-format photos here are less "arty", "archetypal", and symbolic than her amazing aerial views of the Great Plains, shot from Texas to Saskatchewan, in The Inhabited Prairie and Heartland. (Those books are more akin to Emmet Gowin's incredible aerial views of the West). Disarming the Prairie is more of a purely documentary work, but worth dipping into if you have any interest in the transformations wrought on the land -- and the soul.