ESU photography professor wins book prize

Professor of Art Larry Schwarm will receive the inaugural First Book Prize in Photography from the Center for Documentary Studies and Honickman Foundation. The award recognizes his dramatic photos of prairie fires sweeping across the Flint Hills.

"Larry Schwarm's photographs of fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later photographer trying to do better," said Adams. "His pictures convince us that seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious person's life," said photographer and writer Robert Adams, the prize's inaugural judge.

"He engages our attention first by heightening our amazement at the sensuality of fire," Adams continued. "Most of us have enjoyed looking into a fireplace, but few of us have observed as well as he has the astonishing shapes and colors and fluidity of fire. He is so skilled in recording its appearance that occasionally we almost hear the burning and feel the warmth."

Schwarm will receive a grant of $3,000, publication of a book of photography, and inclusion in a traveling exhibition. Adams will write the introduction for the book, which will be published in fall 2003 by Duke University Press in association with Lyndhurst Books of the Center for Documentary Studies.

Schwarm has widely exhibited his photographs of the Kansas landscape, and his work is included in the collections of several American museums.

"My photographs are made on the largest remaining expanse of North American tallgrass prairie," said Schwarm. "Fire is an essential part of the prairie ecosystem. Without fire, this prairie would have been forested. Over time, what started as a natural phenomenon became an annual event controlled by man."

Over the past twelve years Schwarm has taken more than one thousand rolls of film on his prairie fire project. "It has never been my intention to document in the strictest sense of the word, but rather to capture every essence of the fires, which have distinct personalities ranging from calm and lyrical to angry and raging," he said.

The biennial CDS/Honickman Foundation First Book Prize competition is open to American photographers of any age who have never published a book-length work and who use their cameras for creative exploration, whether it be of places, people, or communities; of the natural or social world; of beauty at large or the lack of it; of objective or subjective realities. The prize honors work that is visually compelling, that bears witness, and that has integrity of purpose.

Schwarm's photographs are posted on the university's web site.

Last Updated July 2, 2007>