Fire is an essential element of the ecosystem. Every spring, the expanses of tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills of east-central Kansas undergo controlled burning. For photographer Larry Schwarm, documenting these fires has become a passion. He captures the essence of the fires and their distinct personalities - ranging from calm and lyrical to angry and raging. His photographs allow us to see the redemptive power of fire and to remove ourselves from its tragic elements. Through Schwarm's lens, the horizon takes on new meaning as we view the sensual character of the burning landscape. Schwarm connects the enormous power and devastation of fire to what can only be identified as another kind of creation - the creation of beauty.
Larry Schwarm's photographs have been exhibited widely across the United States over the past ten years, both in solo and group shows. They have appeared in various publications, including An American Century of Photography:From Dry-Plate to Digital, Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography, Harper's Magazine and Blind Spot. His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Beach Museum of Art (Manhattan, Kansas), and Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence, Kansas), and is included in the PaineWebber Landscape Collection and Hallmark Photographic Collections. Larry Schwarm is Professor of Art at Emporia State University in Kansas, where he teaches photography. Robert Adams is one of America's preeminent landscape photographers. His work has been published, exhibited, and collected throughout the world. His books of photographs include From the Missouri West and Perfect Times, Perfect Places and his writings on photography are available in such books as Beauty in Photography and Why People Photograph.
Introduction by Robert Adams Photographs Afterword Index Acknowledgements About the Prize
A startling, mesmerizing series of photographs of prairie fires that transports us from moments of almost apocalyptic splendour to the stillness of near abstraction
"Its pages radiant with crackling sparks, searing flames, pinkish dawns, and indigo twilights, On Fire offers a captivating photo-documentary of the prairie fires that regularly surge across America's largest tall-grass prairie... The power of Schwarm's work derives from the iconographic import of its subject--fire--and also from the abstract potential of each composition. The photos make a distant, largely visual experience more immediate, tactile, and in the case of the photos of smoke plumes, even olfactory."--Library Journal "Among the most dramatic scenes in the American Midwest are the fires each fall as farmers burn off dried grasses in their fields. Few photographers have more potently captured the power of these blazes than Larry Schwarm."--Kyle MacMillan, Denver Post "Exquisite."--Booklist "[A] stunning collection ..." --Dave Ranney, Lawrence Journal-World "[S]tunning images..."--Les Line, Audubon "Larry Schwarm's color photographs of fire gnawing at the prairie have a hellish glory."-- Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle "These pictures, all in color, are stunningly beautiful, displaying flames moving across vast open spaces of prairie, often as the sole link between earth and sky, photographed at day, night, and twilight, under blue skies, clouds, and the moon... Schwarm's cogent afterward positions the fires as one of the four elements, along with earth, air and water, to underscore the mythic quality of the pictures and their subject..."-- John Pultz, Great Plains Quarterly
