In 2005 Rebecca Norris Webb set out to photograph South Dakota, the state where she was raised: a sparsely populated expanse of the Great Plains where buffalo, pronghorn, mule deer and prairie dogs outnumber people, and where powwows, rodeos, buffalo roundups and a corn palace punctuate a landscape shaped by wind and extreme weather. The following year one of her brothers died unexpectedly of heart failure. In the afterword she recalls that the landscape of South Dakota was among the few things that eased her unsettled heart, and asks whether loss has a geography of its own. The book’s organizing question is therefore not regional description but the meeting of grief with a particular place.
That question is carried largely by the book’s construction. My Dakota interweaves 42 photographs with spare text in the photographer’s own scrawling penmanship, so image and handwriting occupy the same pages rather than standing in separate registers. The result, across 116 pages in a hardbound volume with jacket, is intimate in scale and elegiac in tone. Norris Webb came to photography from poetry, and the compression of language against image reflects that formation; the writing does not caption the pictures so much as keep them company.
Radius Books published the collection of photographs and text, edited with Alex Webb and Darius Himes. Both are credited as editors, not photographers; the photographs and text are Norris Webb’s. A second edition exists alongside the first, and the two are distinct objects, so collectors should establish which they are considering. The photographs and their sequencing remain the substance in either case.
The book’s significance lies in how completely its form serves its subject. The elegy is built from weather, distance and silence rather than from explicit narrative, and the handwritten passages give the sequence a diaristic intimacy that a conventional caption apparatus would not. Scarcity claims are not necessary to make the case; the case is the book’s method. Readers interested in the photobook as a place where writing and image are composed together, rather than merely bound together, will find a disciplined and durable example here.
