“Driftless is Frazier’s document about rural Iowa. His home. . . . Years of working, walking, photographing, carefully making notes, names, places. . . . Inhabitants: Farmers, Migrant Workers, their families, Hunters, Churches, Trailers, Storms, Open Fields, Sunday Night. . . . Passionate photographs without sentimentality. His work reaches out: let me tell your story, it is important. Frazier’s work will survive—his book will be the foundation for more to come. . . .”—Robert Frank, prize judge
“I wanted to explore the lives of the people who stay, who are casualties of the growing economic divide that separates America’s rural and metropolitan classes. Having lived in Iowa all my life, these forgotten communities are part of my own history.”—Danny Wilcox Frazier
“Driftless, shot in black-and-white film in a digital age, creates a lonely aura. Young people in trailers framed by beer-can pyramids. Harsh winter blizzards. Cold gun barrels. Old people in barren spaces. . . . Many of the photos are grainy because Frazier didn't use artificial lighting and had to 'push' the film speed. It lends a gritty reality to the shots.”
~Mike Kilen, Des Moines Register
“[Frazier’s] pictures of people recall the street-kid photos of Helen Levitt, the active group images in Ben Shahn’s FSA work, and the famous book The Americans (1959), by Robert Frank, who judged the competition this book won. Elegiacism and a certain bitterness inform the album as a whole. No one looks prosperous; even the young partiers don’t seem cheery. Maybe they’ll all be living in cities in a year. Powerful stuff.”
~Ray Olson, Booklist
“The book is incredible for its raw intimacy and visual sophistication. . . .”
~Bryan Derballa, Wired
“Frazier presents a compelling look at life in contemporary Iowa. When chronicling just the land, Frazier portrays it in a harsh and biting manner through the use of high-contrast and grainy imagery. When documenting Iowa's people, Frazier plays the role of a fly on the wall. He is able to blend in with all sorts of characters in all types of situations, a hallmark of a well-rounded photojournalist. . . . Frazier's melancholy Driftless achieves success in the Iowan's choice to shoot in a style more concerned with content and free-flowing compositions than with the rigors of technical matters such as precise exposure and exacting horizon lines.”
~Chris Sweda, Chicago Sun-Times
“Frazier’s images endeavor to shed light on the people and places that mainstream media neglects to illustrate. As rural economies fail, people and resources are migrating to the coasts and cities, altering rural America. Taken by an insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier’s photographs show us these abandoned places and describe the lives of those people who stay behind. His approach is completely different than this spring’s news stories about Iowa’ spring flooding, which presumed that the impacts, although awful, were limited to the present; nowhere on national media were reports of the long lasting effects of the flooding on Iowa’s already unstable rural economy.”
~Callie Clark-Wiren, Rain Taxi
