In this magnificent new collection, renowned photographer Larry Kanfer documents the diversity of barns throughout the Prairie State, from weathered, abandoned shelters in the countryside to proudly well-preserved landmarks featured in barn ...

Opening Chicagoscapes places the reader amid the breathtaking grandeur and warm humanity of one of the world's great cities, a metropolis both lavish with its pleasures and as hard as weathered steel, a prairie-bound Oz that demands commitment from those seeking its truths. Larry Kanfer and native Chicagoan Alaina Kanfer have captured authentic moments that invite the viewer into pocket universes achieved in collaboration between an acclaimed photographic artist and the living world. From the deep blues of Lake Michigan to (...) imposing winter cityscapes, from awe-inspiring skyscrapers to corner hot dog joints, and from the lakefront chess obsessives to Maxwell Street's indefatigable vendors, Larry Kanfer brings the mesmerizing sensibility acclaimed in his collections Prairiescapes and On Firm Ground to illuminate the subtleties of mood and forces of nature that make Chicago a city unlike any other. (shrink)

Larry and Alaina Kanfer collaborated on Barns of Illinois. They live in Champaign with their two children.

A stunning photographic journey through the landscapes of the Midwest.

"But here the changes are chronological. In my photographs I show time - seasonal change, the cycles of life. That's where the beauty lies." As in his highly acclaimed earlier collection, Prairiescapes, Kanfer presents his own unmistakable vision of the vast heartland. Karla Vallance on National Public Radio described Prairiescapes as "capturing the uncelebrated fields and streams around the town where I grew up and turning the water of those ordinary places in mundane.

A former student of architecture at the University of Illinois, Kanfer has developed a kinship with the rural regions of the Prairie State. He draws upon a rich background in art, design, and travel to focus on the unique qualities of the midwesten landscape, exhibiting an unusual sensitivity to composition, color, texture, and light. Kanfer isolates singular images--a solitary barn, a rural mailbox atop a roadside post, a red stop sign caught in the nighttime glare of a car's headlight, cornflower (...) blossoms springing from a ditch--as well as broader prairie scenes. (shrink)