A few years ago…

I bought a used pickup truck with four-wheel drive, a high suspension and heavy-duty shocks. I put a shell on the back. It is just the thing for exploring back roads and hard to get to places and to work and camp out of doing the kind of landscape photography I like to do. That’s the main reason I bought it.

In the early spring of 2017 on a short trip up to Butler County to deliver some artwork I decided to go home the long way around in order to try to find a place I had photographed in black and white many years ago in 2000.

The old grain elevator at what used to be a town called Nimburg in the northern part of the county had seen much better days long ago. But it still had a plainspoken character and that stately quality of an old structure that was once a key component of its community now sitting unused and unoccupied nevertheless asserting a quiet dignity by remaining standing.

I had my large format camera gear in the truck because I hoped that the Nimburg elevator was still there and I could make a new photograph in color. Not only was it still there but after I made that exposure I poked my way home taking back roads and making a few other pictures.

I was just finishing a multi-year project documenting the changing seasons at Nine Mile Prairie, (http://www.ninemileprairie.com/) a hilly University of Nebraska research plot northwest of Lincoln’s airport that is one of the largest remaining unplowed preserves of native tall grass prairie left in Nebraska – and which is situated at the far southern tip of the region known locally as the “Bohemian Alps.” But I was not yet committed to doing anything next as follow up.

I was aware that the region around Nimburg and the hilly country of eastern Butler, western Saunders and northern Lancaster counties went by that funny name Bohemian Alps and that my friend, the poet Ted Kooser, lived up there and had written with wry affection about the old timers and idiosyncratic folks who were his neighbors.

After my Nimburg trip negatives came back from the lab, I scanned and worked up the images and I decided to make an open-ended commitment to getting to know the Bohemian Alps. For me having a fence around my subject literally like at Nine Mile Prairie, or figuratively, as in the much larger Platte River Basin (http://plattebasintimelapse.com/) is essential to keeping my curiosity from wandering too far afield and losing focus.

So deciding to document this distinctive geographic region from season to season over a couple of years made sense. It’s a lot bigger and more varied in use than Nine Mile but also close to home and more manageable than the vast Platte Basin. Although as I tell my students, “You better become very enamored of your subject, get to know it very well and learn to love even the flaws like you would your lover’s – or you will lose interest and begin to harbor unspoken resentment and maybe even abandon your project!”

As in my previous rural Nebraska photographic explorations I’m drawn to the many small streams, old steel bridges, dilapidated farm buildings, rural cemeteries, old trees and out of the way places – and how the light, colors and textures on the land evolve with the changing of the seasons. The sweet and full, tinctured with the sad and lonely….

Several years out from that spring day looking for the old Nimburg elevator these images are what I have to show for the effort that hasn’t really been any effort at all, but a growing sense of affection for a place with whom I’ve become intimate.

Michael Farrell

September, 2019