Warner, Nancy. This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains. Photographs by Nancy Warner. Text by David Stark.

Columbia University Press, 2014. First edition, 1st printing.  Bound in black cloth, fine with near fine protected dust jacket.  118 pages. As small farms disappeared on the prairie, Nancy Warner photographed abandoned homes and agricultural buildings in Cuming County, Nebraska, in a way reminiscent of Wright Morris in The Inhabitants (1946).  According to photographer Martha Casanave, "Warner's exquisite and  haunting images are like memory itself: fragments that the imagination weaves together into a meaningful whole." Many of the photographs in this book were first exhibited at the Great Plains Art Museum in 2008. Summary:

A Separate Place (1974) is a lyrical photo-documentary that captures the spirit and landscape of La Honda, a small town tucked into the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. Published by the Sierra Club, the book is a meditation on the concept of "place" and the desire for isolation in a rapidly developing world.

Core Narrative and Text

The text, written by Charles Jones, is a deeply personal and observational account of living in a rural enclave. Jones wrote much of the material while living in various makeshift dwellings—including a blue tent, an old ranch building, and a cabin—and even while writing from the back room of a local saloon.

• Atmospheric Insight: Jones explores the feeling of being "hidden" by the ancient redwoods and the unique social fabric of a community that deliberately exists on the margins of mainstream society.

• Environmental Connection: Typical of Sierra Club publications of the era, the text emphasizes a profound, almost spiritual connection to the rugged terrain and the necessity of preserving such wild, "separate" spaces.

Photographic Style

Nancy Warner’s black-and-white photographs provide the visual soul of the book. Her work avoids the grand, sweeping vistas often associated with nature photography of the time, opting instead for an "intimate landscape"approach:

• Focus on Detail: She captures the play of light through thick canopy, the texture of weathered wood, and the quiet, fog-heavy atmosphere characteristic of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

• Human Presence: Her images document the modest structures and the subtle marks left by the inhabitants, reinforcing the book's theme of a humble, harmonious coexistence with nature.

Key Information

• Published: 1974 by Sierra Club Books.

• Format: 143 pages, featuring high-quality monochrome plates.

• Significance: The book is a quintessential artifact of the 1970s "back-to-the-land" movement, serving as both a local history of La Honda and a broader philosophical inquiry into how humans find sanctuary in the natural world.

Summary: A Separate Place is a quiet, evocative tribute to a specific California valley, celebrating the beauty of seclusion and the profound influence that a specific geography can have on the human spirit.

Nancy Warner is an American fine-art, portrait, and architectural photographer based in San Francisco, widely recognized for her evocative documentary visual studies of vanishing American landscapes and community heritage. Working out of her studio in San Francisco's Chinatown, Warner has developed a versatile portfolio spanning analog pinhole photography, digital portraits, still life, and urban architectural series focused on her surrounding neighborhood.She gained widespread critical acclaim for a decade-long documentary project exploring abandoned rural structures across the American Midwest, capturing the poignant decline of family farms and outbuildings through a lens of memory, texture, and light. Originally exhibited at the Great Plains Art Museum as Going Back: Midwestern Farm Places (2008), this major body of work was published by Columbia University Press in the monograph This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains (2014) in collaboration with sociologist David Stark. Celebrated for weaving architectural decay with oral histories and human presence, Warner's fine-art photographs have been featured in publications such as Slate and Black & White, establishing her legacy as a compassionate chronicler of rural transformations and built environments.