Nathan Pearce – High and Lonesome

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

If you haven’t visited Fairfield, Illinois, you might be excused for thinking it looks like Nathan Pearce’s photographs. I hadn’t, so I googled Fairfield and traveled down Main Street via Street View. I did not spot any vegan restaurants, food carts, indie record stores, e-bike shops, or comedy clubs. But I did see Pampered Paws Pet Wash, JJ’s Package Store, Faith Holiness Church, Dairy Queen, Joe’s Body Shop, Frontier Community College, Tyree’s Tax Service, Carolyn’s Hair Designs, and Lemond Chevrolet, among other places.

None of them appear in the fifty-one black-and-white photographs in High and Lonesome. You see no prosperous preachers or farm equipment salesmen, no chatty dollar store clerks or pumped-up high school sports teams. No quilting shows or canning contests either, although you can imagine them appearing in the book as icons of the rural Midwest.

Pearce’s Fairfield lies outside town a bit where space hangs heavy around isolated houses, rusty metal farm buildings, and spare, puritanical churches. In winter you see fog, leafless trees, cornfield stubble, cows in a muddy field, and a deer someone has bagged. If it is summer the sky is dark and overcast. You catch glimpses of in-between places – a weed-covered mound, a length of white picket fence, the sides of houses, an overturned wheelbarrow in what might be a garden, an overgrown, vine-covered fence.

You do not meet the prosperous preacher or farm equipment salesman but rather unsmiling younger folks, some of whom look like they have woken up after a bad dream. A skinny kid in a military uniform scowls at you. A young tattooed woman eyes you warily. On a sofa a dark-haired woman watches. Even a toddler gives you the eye. The only smiling person you see is a middle-aged, possibly juiced-up farmer type, dancing with his wife while clutching a drink.

When you go inside, the décor time warps you back four or five decades: cobweb-covered reference books, a calendar from 1993, and symbols of the old patriarchal order in the form of dusty framed portraits of Important Men. Jesus and Elvis and John Wayne too, along with Illinois native son Abraham Lincoln.

The title, High and Lonesome, was a bit of a head scratcher. The lonesome part seems obvious, but the high part does not. High, but in Illinois it probably does not refer to hills and mountains. The recreational usage variety then? Or is it a line from a song I don’t know?

Handsomely printed in rich blacks and nuanced whites, Pearce’s photographs are mostly straight-on views with no unnecessary decorations. Plain, nothing fancy. Just the facts, ma’am. Gitter done.

Nathan Pearce gets it done in High and Lonesome. A savvy selection of people and places, it takes you out of your world and puts you into his.

Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Nathan Pearce – High and Lonesome

Photographer: Nathan Pearce (born in 1986, lives in Illinois)

Language: English

Text: Tim Carpenter

Design: Clint Woodside

Printed in China

Cloth hardcover with embossed photos; 51 B/W photographs; sewn binding; 84 pages, unpaginated; 10.25 X 10.25 inches; ISBN 978-1-952523-13-7

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.