Northwoods Journals

The Mythology of Growing Up Midwestern
Northwoods Journals, by Kurt Simonson

I left Minnesota after high school for a new life in California, and I have been navigating the resulting fracture ever since. This project is, in part, about the relocation of story and one’s sense of place: how does one sort through nostalgia and memories of the past to find a present working narrative?

The images speak in the language of seasons: a season of planting, of building, of harvesting, and of decay. There is a season to start afresh and a season to simply be still… to celebrate life and to accept it’s passing. The photographs also speak to the mythology of the Midwest: the lumberjacks and the woods; the farms, lakes, and rivers; the cars and the big boy’s toys... some of these parts of the story are true to my experience, while other parts are stories I lived “around.” The images are a merging of myth and memory, a collection of echoes: some belonging to me, some to my father, my mother, my grandparents, or others in the story before me.

"A sense of place is not sentimental: it is practical and necessary. The mistake is to consider place provincially. While a sense of place is based on local knowledge, it is not limited to local knowledge-- it includes a range of places… What is one caught in the forced mobility of our urban culture to do? The answer lies in story…. though I may be out of my place, I am not out of my story."
-John Leax, Grace is Where I Live