Proposal
Imagine May of 1898. It was a formative time for Robert Allerton and for what would become The Farms. What is remembered in the land?
This is a photographic project: walking the land, dreaming it is a century ago, what might be developed. This is a modernist look showing the land as it is today, informed by the past.
During the residency I will produce a set of Cabinet Cards, a format popular in the late 1800s, small objects (41⁄2” by 61⁄2”) to hold and display. Similar to cartes de visite, but slightly larger, they were used for landscapes. It is a form to slow us down and appreciate the immediate, to underwhelm our overwhelmed senses, to pay attention to the print we’re holding and what it evokes.
The residency is a retreat. Dawn and dusk are transition times when the sun is slant and the mind is open to feeling what is seemingly hidden; an extended walking meditation, letting mind and body, feet and camera, move through the landscape.
The land was there before Robert. It will be here after we are gone. It has been shaped by ice ages and river floods. It has been inhabited by indigenous people (Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations). The Potawatomi were marched through Monticello in 1838, with treaties broken, they were forcibly relocated to Kansas, on the Trail of Death. The land was collectively managed by the indigenous nations; it was privately owned; it is now held in public trust.
That spring, Robert was 25. He and his childhood friend Frederic Bartlett had spent five years in Europe studying to be artists. Before leaving Paris, Robert had burned his paintings, declaring he would never be more than an amateur artist. [Note: the root of amateur is love, to do something for the love of it.] Robert brought an artist’s eye to Piatt County, treating the land as his canvas.
Robert immediately started shaping things, moving the old Stallcup house to be near a spring. He wallpapered his privy with Toulouse-Lautrec posters, bringing his past into his present. Living on the land, he was imagining what he might build. My mid-20’s were also a time of setting the course of my life.
This project will photograph the land and invite us to envision what might be.
 |
| Larry Wolf, Creek Bed, formatted as a Cabinet Card (2025) |
[submitted to the Joan and Peter Hood Residency at the Allerton Park and Retreat Center]
