1971 | Near Okreek, South Dakota
The Sandhills of western Nebraska, long waves rolling on old sand dunes, grassy surfaces rippling in the steady prairie wind, offer a chance to walk on an ocean.
Not far from where this picture was made, just across the South Dakota line, Harold Moore introduced me to his favorite spot near Nenzel, to the southwest. We drove across a scarce track to the base of an abandoned fire lookout tower, made the climb, and looked out at what seemed like fifty-mile horizons in every direction. Nearer, we counted Harold’s truck and an old, resting windmill. Our inventory was only those two items – we were seeing next to nothing, and it seemed like everything.
*Harold was not just a retired typewriter mechanic volunteering as a pressman at the St. Francis School, he was a deeply curious explorer. One of his shorter expeditions in 1971 was into the attic of the Mission, where he discovered glass-plate negatives from the turn of the nineteenth century and large rollfilm negatives from the 1920’s and 1930’s. Harold had attributed the glass plates to John Andersen and the rollfilm work to Eugene Buechel, a Jesuit priest and teacher who served at St. Francis for many years.
We divided the tasks to bring these to light; when I first saw the Buechel negatives, I thought right away, “These belong in the Museum of Modern Art!” John Szarkowski thought so too, after five of my California students joined me in South Dakota to work up the 2200 negatives into a proposal to the Museum, along with an exhibition catalog. Forty-one of Buechel’s pictures were exhibited at MoMA in the fall of 1975, and the portfolio was acquired for its collection.