CLEVELAND, OH.- In 2005 Rebecca Norris Webb began to photograph her home state of South Dakota, documenting her impressions of the landscape and life in the harsh climate. After one of her brothers unexpectedly died the following year, her images began to shift. Tones became more muted, the palette more autumnal. Descriptive views became enigmatic and the series evolved into an elegy for her brother. “For months,” wrote the artist, “one of the few things that eased my unsettled heart was the landscape of South Dakota.”

My Dakota: Photographs by Rebecca Norris Webb features 27 color photographs that range in subject matter from landscapes to architecture. Interwoven with the photographs are lines from a poem written, and handwritten on the walls, by the artist. Webb started as a writer and had just finished her master’s degree in poetry when she fell in love with photography. My Dakota: Photographs by Rebecca Norris Webb will be on view in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery from May 17 through August 16, 2015.

“These hauntingly beautiful views depict a present imbued with the past,” said Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography. “They also gently suggest that as seductive as that past may be, it is no longer habitable. Webb came to understand that the series had become a means of addressing her grief and ultimately, letting it go.”

The text and the pictures partner to convey the experience of discovering these sites and the depth of the emotions they evoked in the artist. Grappling with humans’ impact on the land and how it has shaped their lives, Norris Webb photographed fields, farms, both occupied and deserted, town life and wildlife. The images form a eulogy for disappearing family farms and the small towns supported by them. They also capture the artist’s personal catharsis.