In 1990 Terry Evans began photographing Matfield Green, a Chase County, Kansas, town of a few dozen residents whose cattle-shipping railhead days had passed; a single bar-café remained in business. She worked there often for eight years, returned a decade later, and continued through 2010, so the book carries two decades of a place within its 176 hardbound pages. Radius Books frames the result less as documentation than as short stories inspired by the town and the prairie hills around it—a distinction that matters when reading how the pictures are ordered and paced.

The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Zajakowski described Evans as rendering each person and scene with knowing respect, her affection clear but her regard for her subjects strong enough to avoid romanticizing them. That unsentimental eloquence is the hinge of the project. Evans, a Kansas native born in 1944, has photographed the prairies and plains of North America for four decades, attending to the complex relationships between land and people; Prairie Stories keeps that long attention on one community rather than a sweeping region.

The book’s form supports the claim. Sixty-nine color and thirty-one duotone images, at roughly 9.5 by 9.5 inches, move between residents and their working land, allowing the returns of 2008 to 2010 to sit beside earlier visits without forcing a before-and-after narrative. Evans is the sole photographer credited here, and the sequencing is hers. For collectors of contemporary landscape photography—particularly work that treats rural places as inhabited rather than empty—this is a concentrated, self-contained example of an artist’s extended engagement with a single locale, and of a publisher known for attentive bookmaking.