Catherine DeLattre came to photography by an indirect route. She was studying archaeology at Kent State University when a required course drew her to the medium; later, at Purdue University, she moved from black-and-white into color, prompted by the example of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. A parallel career as a film still photographer runs alongside a personal practice centered on vernacular subjects — barns, vehicles, houses, and roadside elements in rural landscapes. The Great Wide Open gathers that work: sixty-two images across ninety-six pages, published by Setanta Books as a first edition in a 240 x 240 mm hardback, with an essay by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz.
What distinguishes the pictures is a disciplined restraint. DeLattre photographs these scenes without intervention, leaving the ordinary architecture of rural life to speak in its own register; meaning arrives through sustained attention and a growing awareness of time passing. The publisher describes this stance as “empathetic neutrality,” and the phrase is apt: the work shares the visual composure associated with the New Topographics, yet declines their detachment, extending instead a humanist engagement with place and a quiet reckoning with belonging.
The biographical line matters to the book’s temper. Raised in Pennsylvania, DeLattre taught in Maine and New York before moving to New York City in 1979, where she worked at the International Center of Photography and photographed everyday urban life with the same observational patience. She now divides her time between the city and rural Pennsylvania, and the landscapes she records are those shaped by human presence — inhabited, used, and slowly altered.
For collectors, the appeal lies in the coherence of the project rather than any claim of scarcity. Sixty-two plates is enough room for an argument to develop, and the square format, consistent across the edition, suits a body of work that depends on evenness of tone rather than spectacle. Rabinowitz’s essay provides a considered frame for photographs whose subject is not nostalgia but the plain fact of how people leave marks on land, and how those marks outlast them.
