Chicago photographer draws inspiration from Kansas prairies

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) - A photographer from Kansas City keeps trying to capture the prairie life that first inspired her to take her camera to vantage points above ground.

Terry Evans, who's now based in Chicago, has her photography on display through June in an exhibit called "The Power of Place" at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KCUR-FM reported .

Evans never intended to become a landscape photographer, she said.

She was more motivated by portraits of people and their stories, beginning her career in Kansas City trying to understand with her camera what it meant to live in poverty.

"I discovered that photography could be an interface with the world," Evans said. "It was a much different experience than sitting by myself in my studio painting. I really loved thinking that the camera was a way to explore the world ... and gain me access."

Evans found her love for landscapes after moving with her husband to a farmhouse near Salina. She started taking pictures for the Land Institute, where scientists were working on sustainability efforts by studying the self-sufficient prairie ecosystem.

Evans said photographing prairies was a vastly different world "than my own front yard, which was just all the same species of grass."

She said she believed that if she could understand the prairie, the whole universe would reveal itself to her.

She's been chasing that level of understanding across the world ever since.

Evans spent last winter photographing a single oak tree on the South Side of Chicago.

The Oak Savannah is "the ecosystem that is the transition between prairie and forest," Evans said. The tree exists because it was able to survive prairie fires, she said.

"It's a very complicated tree with very winding and interesting branches," Evans said. "And I can never quite see the whole thing. So I keep going back and back and back trying to thoroughly see. And maybe if I'm lucky, understand what it's like to be this ancient oak tree."