William Wylie

A Prairie Season William Wylie

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Photography. Across the plains, in towns too small and scattered to field a full squad, high schools play six-man football. This book follows a single season of one such team, Prairie School, located in the vast Pawnee National Grassland, near New Raymer, Colorado. Through photographic portraits and video stills, William Wylie offers intimate glimpses of the camaraderie, communal rituals, and drama of the sport, set against immensities of sky and horizon. The dynamic relationships exposed in each frame, between place and space or figure and ground, encapsulates the invariant and fleeting intensities of a fading American experience. On Friday nights in fall, with a moon rising over the plains, surrounded by all that space, and the families and teachers and ranchers and rough-necks gathered in the bleachers under the lights to watch a game, there might not be any better place to be.