Early work from 1970's and 1980's

I grew up on a farm in north central Iowa, attended Iowa State University and worked in Des Moines, Iowa after college. In 1975 I moved to Madison, WIsconsin. Madison being a fairly sophisticated place for its size allowed me to meet people there from many parts of the United States and the world. People often asked me "what do people do in Iowa?". I was always surprised by the question and sometimes answered, "they live!" I was also curious about the source of their questions. I wondered what was their view of rural society. The, what was my own view or emotional understanding of it. The conversations stimulated my deeper interest in what does my place of origin really look like, where did I come from, what is that life, and again what does it look like. It took me some time to realize I was asking "who am I?" These pictures are a fraction of my nearly 40 year of looking (photographing) at that question. Did I answer the question of who am I? Yes, but the answer keeps changing so I keep looking.