My place of longing

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My place of longing

is most probably a weird one for you!

Susanne Helmert

Feb 17, 2023

If you could pick one place on earth to visit, where would you go?

Although I could name a few places I would like to visit, when I had to pick one place I would like to go to again, it would be the Great Plains of North America.

Ever since my first road trip from Chicago, Illinois, to the middle of Nowhere in North Dakota in 2012, the Great Plains hold a special place in my heart. No other place has inspired me as an artist, like the vast open spaces with its many derelict buildings telling stories of the families who struggled to survive in this harsh place.

The author Timothy Egan has a perfect description of the Great Plains in his book “The worst hard time”:

“Throughout the Great Plains, a visitor passes more nothing than something. Or so it seems. An hour goes by on the same straight line and then pops up a town on a map - Twitty, Texas, or Invale, Nebraska. The town has slipped away without a funeral or proper burial.

In other places, scraps of life are frozen in death at mid stride (…). Here is a wood-framed shack buried by sand, with only the roof joists still visible. In the distance is a copse of skeletal trees, the bones of orchards dried to a brittleness like charcoal. And is that a schoolhouse, with just the chimney and two walls standing? Then you see fence posts, the nubs sticking out of sterile brown earth. (…) The fence posts rose six feet or more out of the ground. They are buried now but for the nubs that poke through layers of dust.

In those cedar posts and collapsed homes is the story of this place: how the greatest grassland in the world was turned inside out, how the crust blew away, raged up in the sky and showered down a suffocating blackness off and on for most of a decade. (…) The people who live here now, the ones who never left, are still trying to make sense of why earth turned on them.”

Coming from a relatively small country (compared to the United States) and a densely populated one too, the endless rolling hills of grassland and gigantic fields of canola and corn left me stunned. That one could drive for hours without passing by a single town, or any other signs of human life left me sometimes wondering if I am still on the same planet. With every abandoned house I photographed, I wanted to know more about the people who lived here, their stories, and the Great Plains' history in generell.

Artworks from the series “Untold Stories” (2019)

I read several books about the Dust Bowl era and stories by contemporary witnesses to gain a better understanding. Here is a very brief summary:

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Great Plains was a region of promise and hope as well as disappointment and despair. Millions of people came in pursuit of a better life. They claimed a piece of land, established their farmsteads and started to turn the grassland into fields. Soon towns, schools and churches rose from the plains.

Little did they know about the harsh environment with its extreme cold and heat, little precipitation, a propensity for drought and incessant winds. Many settlers also underestimated the physical rigors, the social isolation and the economic hardship which came with being a farmer out on the Plains.

Many of them tried hard to make a living but eventually had to give up. Beaten by drought, bitter winters, crop failure and bankruptcy, they had lost all their hope. They packed up their few possessions and moved on.

The abandoned farmhouses, schools and churches dotting the Great Plains today are like silent witnesses of these past times. They tell the stories of the hopes and dreams for a better life and of the many failed attempts to conquer the different challenges of living in this part of the world. But they also serve as a reminder of the fragility and ephemeral nature of life.