This Place, These People

David Stark is the Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University, where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. His most recent book is The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Nancy Warner is a fine-art and portrait photographer based in San Francisco. Many of the photographs in this book were first exhibited at the Great Plains Art Museum as Going Back: Midwestern Farm Places (2008). The photographs are available for sale, exhibit, or licensing. Contact Nancy Warner at www.warnerphoto.com.

• Preface Photographs and Voices Afterword List of Photographs List of Voices Acknowledgments

I was very moved by this evocative, literate, and informative book. Warner's beautiful-and painful-photographs are a perfect companion to Stark's writing and the 'voices' of the Nebraskans that are included. I am very grateful for this sensitive and sad look back. -- Ruth Silverman, former associate curator of the International Center of Photography and two-time winner of the Photography-Book-of-the-Year award for The Dog and Athletes Richly nuanced. Publishers Weekly A melancholy, touching look at a vanishing way of life. -- Sarah Bryan Miller St. Louis Post-Dispatch Each photo presents a snapshot of a place vacated. Together, they tell a larger story of an America fading into the landscape... Conversations, captured by Stark, are sprinkled throughout the book, bringing insight and understated humor to the inanimate beauty of Warner's photographs. -- Casey Logan The Omaha World Herald A moving collection... The country and the book are spacious, the stories are moving, and the photographs are wonderful. RALPH magazine Quietly evocative Billings Gazette