A Prairie Season by William Wylie

A Prairie Season by William Wylie

Flood Editions ISBN 978-1-7332734-4-2 $29.95

Now available from Flood Editions and SPD Books

Across the plains, in towns too small and scattered to field a full squad, high schools play six-man football. This book follows a single season of one such team, Prairie School, located in the vast Pawnee National Grassland, near New Raymer, Colorado. Through photographic portraits and video stills, William Wylie offers intimate glimpses of the camaraderie, communal rituals, and drama of the sport, set against immensities of sky and horizon. The dynamic relationships exposed in each frame, between place and space or figure and ground, encapsulates the invariant and fleeting intensities of a fading American experience. “On Friday nights in fall, with a moon rising over the plains, surrounded by all that space, and the families and teachers and ranchers and rough­necks gathered in the bleachers under the lights to watch a game, there might not be any better place to be.”

For over thirty years, William Wylie’s work has focused on the significance of landscape, exploring asso­ciations between particular places and their histories. He has published five previous books of photography: Riverwalk (2000), Stillwater(2002), Carrara (2009), Route 36 (2010), and Pompeii Archive (2018). His photographs and short films have been shown internationally and can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Yale University Art Museum. He lives in Charlottesville and is the Commonwealth Professor of Art at the University of Virginia.