Picture the landscape of downstate Illinois–the view from the interstate anywhere south of Joliet. What landscape? you say. It’s just flat ground and cornfields dotted here and there with grain elevators and farmhouses with their obligatory six trees. No rippling lakes, no cascading waterfalls. No hill high enough for a good bobsled run. Not even enough rocks to build a stone wall.
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Consider, for example, one of the drabbest scenes Illinois can offer: late winter–February, probably–mild enough to melt the snow but not warm enough to melt the heart. A dank, gray day, the air thickened with fog, water in the ruts of a muddy country lane. Kanfer’s photo Springtime in Mahomet makes that sort of day worth remembering: the stillness, the chill that seeps through our boots, the squelch of mud, a farmstead barely discernible through the fog.
Kanfer, whose photographs have been displayed in several national art galleries and at the Art Institute, works out of his studio and gallery in Champaign. But he’s not a native midwesterner; he came here from Portland, Oregon, in 1973 to become an architecture student at the U. of I. Maybe his outsider’s eye helped him see the Illinois landscape as something worth remarking.
There are no people visible in this world that is so molded by their presence. A shovel leans by a barn door, laundry blows on a line, a chair waits on a porch. An empty road, an abandoned house. Even the Amish buggy trotting down a dirt road has no visible driver. This emptiness is as true to the Illinois countryside as its flat horizon.
