The Inhabitants

"In 1942, having purchased his first camera, a Rolleiflex, a few years before, [Morris] applied for and won the second Guggenheim Fellowship ever awarded in photography (the first had gone to Edward Weston in 1937), and he went to work photographing in and around Chapman, Nebraska. Like an archeologist, he focused not on people directly, but their artifacts--objects (mostly made of wood) bearing their imprint. ... Morris began to write short prose texts related to these images, and they began to combine with the images to form something greater than the two parts. This first work in photofiction was followed by The Home Place in 1948 (supported by his second Guggenheim Fellowship) and eventually God's Country and My People, in 1968, to form a trilogy of word and image works."--The Book of 101 Books : Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century / Edited by Andrew Roth. New York : PPP Editions in association with Ruth Horowitz, 2001.