In the 1950s, two legendary photographers created a body of work that has since been nearly forgotten. Dorothea Lange, whose images distilled the Great Depression, and landscape photographer Ansel Adams visited Utah — “The Place,” as Brigham Young called it — to document the lives of Mormon communities. Their “Three Mormon Towns” collaboration appeared in Life magazine, capitalizing on the public fascination with the growing religion, but the photographs all but faded from memory. In a Rugged Land re-assembles the images, capturing snippets of moving life as families rise from church pews, children balance atop horses and a mother cans pounds of green beans. In the text, James R. Swensen describes the project’s thorny history, showing how the images provide windows into the communities they depict as well as into the lives of their aging photographers, who hoped to “re-enter the discourse of photography.”



By James R. Swensen

432 pages, softcover: $34.95

University of Utah Press, 2018