 |
Bury Me in the Back Forty By Kyler Zeleny.
 |
Photographs by Kyler Zeleny
The Velvet Cell, Berlin, Germany, 2024. 168 pp.
When we last checked in on Kyler Zeleny, in November 2020, he had just published Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle. The product of 10,000 miles and 4 years of road tripping, this sharply observed monograph revealed the rural Canadian heartland through a colorful blend of portraits, social landscapes, and prairie vistas.
Crown Ditch was the second volume in a planned trilogy of photobooks, following on the heels of Zeleny’s debut Out West (The Velvet Cell, 2014). That title had staked out similar territory (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) in methodical style: square format pictures of rural outposts captioned simply by census counts, e.g. 633, 504, 394, 108, and so on. You didn’t need the place names to get the general gist of either book. These were tiny burgs to begin with, and their populations seemed to shrink before Zeleny’s lens.
For the final book of his trilogy, Bury Me In The Back Forty, Zeleny has turned his attention to the Canadian prairie once again. This time he has zeroed in on a single location: Mundare, population ~700. This is a small town in central Alberta, first settled by Ukrainian immigrants in 1907. It proudly claims to host the world’s largest garlic sausage statue. It is also the original hometown of Kyler Zeleny. Never mind Thomas Wolfe’s warning. Zeleny can indeed go home again. He toted along his camera gear, plus an old yearbook for good measure. The resulting monograph documents some of the people and places of modern day Mundare. Better yet, it offers a window into Zeleny’s shifting curatorial style.
 |
What do I mean by stylistic shift? Well, design-wise Bury Me In the Back Forty is markedly different than either of its predecessors. For starters, the raw physical framework is lifted directly from an earlier book, a decidedly non-artistic community history from 1980 called “Memories of Mundare”. As best I can tell, this was something like a town almanac or annual register. Its bygone happenings are reproduced as facsimile pages, renumbered and repurposed into the new tome. Zeleny provides all of this material without much explanation or context, at least initially, and it’s up to the reader to sort through the mundane Mundare minutae. A table of contents lays out the local nuts and bolts, listing such subjects as the Mundare Choir, the Mundare Fire Brigade, the school system, and various civic stalwarts and events. Taken altogether, “Memories of Mundare” is a sort of book length encyclopedia entry. It’s comprised of dense two-column text, spiced regularly with half-tone monochrome pictures, all faithfully replicated.
 |
The old tome is well produced and squeaky clean, and it glows with civic pride. It’s a pleasant enough read. But for Zeleny’s purposes, “Memories of Mundare” is merely the first layer. Its fawning accounts become a sort of visual wallpaper, the foundation for a mélange of added photos, notes, and mementos. A color print of a friend in a bar is nice enough on its own. But it takes on new meaning when montaged atop past social gatherings. A studio shot of glazed donuts makes an intriguing contrast with posed photos of group calisthenics. Zeleny’s photos of utility poles, campers, and obscured ladders veer into experimental territory in their own right, and they’re given an absurdist jolt when juxtaposed with old news accounts.
 |
 |
The old pages are generally subservient, sometimes buried completely, other times lost in the experimental frenzy. After all, who needs an archival counterpoint when contemporary playthings are right at hand? Zeleny bobs and weaves between various media, interjecting cutouts (a symbol for declining rural populations?), sewn collage, crayon markings, cropping notations, and typewritten correspondence. “The result,” at least according to Velvet Cell, “is a pluralistic history of the community that embraces both official and unofficial accounts of events.”
The range of specs, styles, and approaches is impressive. Zeleny probably had a lot of fun putting this book together. But it’s hard to get a good fix on his intentions. Is Bury Me In The Back Forty meant to be a trip down memory lane (he was born in 1988, several years after “Memories Of Mundare”), a post-modern assemblage, a slice of prairie living, or avant-garde monograph? Hmmm. I’m afraid I can’t answer that question with much certainty. But rest assured, his book is entertaining. And readers will likely learn some Mundare trivia while browsing. After all the visual fireworks have closed, Zeleny’s lengthy afterword sheds some light on the subject. His essay ties together Mundare’s history with some of his own connections there. Zeleny himself has decamped for Edmonton (roughly 40 miles west of Mundare) and the rest of the town is on a similar trajectory. The story is the same throughout Canada’s rural west. Most towns face declining prospects. “The prairie party is over,” Zeleny writes. “Today the town is full of solitary drinkers, drinking from bottles that empty them.”
 |
 |
Although Zeleny’s essay is interesting, the tone is somewhat impersonal and academic, closer to reportage than diary. Perhaps that’s just his inner photographer speaking, hewing to straight facts? Or maybe some of the old almanac’s expository style has rubbed off? Or it could be those many years living away from Mundare, tucked in a cohort of urbane photo theorists. In any case Bury Me In The Back Forty leans smartly into the contemporary photobook zeitgeist, which has come to favor curation, editing, and design over the straight style of his debut. This is probably why it succeeds as the final volume of the trilogy. He’s come a long way from Out West, in both years and method. Bury Me In The Back Forty feels like a mark in the sand. Here I am, it announces, the third and final book. This is the impossible spot where Mundare meets photoland.
Purchase Book
Read More Book Reviews
 |
 |
 |
