In This Land - Issues 7 & 8

Two zines at the same time! Both feature years of film photos from the areas around Oglala National Grassland in Nebraska.

Most of the color was shot on expired film and developed with my DIY ECN-2 kits. The black & white was home developed and shot on various emulsions over the years.

The zines themselves are both 44 pages long. And again, you get both.

From the intro to #7:

Oglala National Grassland is a disjointed collection of public land in the northwest corner of Nebraska. This landscape holds prairie and forests, canyons and badlands.

The land was lived upon by the Cheyenne People as part of their alliance with the Arapaho. Various bands of Lakota people also called this home. When the white settlers came they established ranches and a military fort.

With the presence of soldiers and the culmination of the Great Sioux War of 1876, the Cheyenne were rounded up and held at Fort Robinson.

Crazy Horse, the Oglala leader, surrendered at this fort and was shortly killed by his captors.

Near the fort, the Battle of Warbonnet Creek was fought. The famous showman Buffalo Bill Cody killed and scalped Yellow Hair. There is now a monument to the battle and the scalping.

Through the 1900s, white ranchers settled the area, founding towns such as Harrison, Crawford and Montrose, connected first by the stagecoach and then the railroad.

After the Depression, much of the private land was claimed by the Federal government and turned into the Oglala National Grassland.

Returning to the same location over 1,200 miles away five years in a row may seem like a waste to some. Why not see other places? Why not explore the unknown? Why not move on?

But the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. it isn't like I travel only to Oglala National Grassland. There are many various sites I see along the way both to and from and far afield from this wonderful location.

simply because I've been to a location before doesn't mean I have photographed it or explored it fully in even the smallest of ways.

The more you return to a place, the more ways you get to know it. If you visit it once, even spending a few days there, you cannot see all of its various moods, all of the light, even all of the land. Especially with a region as wide and varied as Oglala, even living there wouldn't afford that luxury.

as the years pass my skills have improved. Not just in photography, but in finding new corners to explore. Also, your choices in equipment will change over time, as will your preferences in emulsion.

In short, I return to these places because it is a measure of how far I've come. In this zine, I am sharing photos from five years of travel to Oglala National Grassland. With each passing year, I have changed as a person and a photographer.