Deb Aronson

Looking for the Edge

Photographer Larry Kanfer has made a career out of capturing the quiet beauty of the Illinois prairie

First appeared in Illinois magazine in December 2002 under Profiles

The dawn is dull, the day trying to decide if it will be spring or remain winter. The houses in this Champaign neighborhood are faded and worn, the sidewalks cracked and dingy and in this gray, muddy, early spring day there is little vegetation to enliven the scene.

Photographer Larry Kanfer parks his minivan at an intersection and bounds out, Hasselblad camera in hand. His assistant, Justin Hilden, and he confer for a moment beside the van and then Kanfer strides across the street. He plants his tripod, takes a light reading and shoots. He immediately strides onward, turning, focusing, shooting, and again. His face is composed, there is no hesitation, Larry Kanfer is at work.

Ask anyone on the streets of Champaign-Urbana, and they will know Kanfer and his work. Kanfer’s photographs of prairie and farmscapes capture the subtle beauty of the region that, until he came along, was rarely portrayed. “Kanfer is one of the country’s more gifted photographers. He has the sensitivity and the eye of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter,” wrote Milton Esterow in ARTnews. One reviewer commented that Kanfer “manages the not-inconsiderable feat of making one long for the Middle West.”

This particular March morning Kanfer, tidy in a denim shirt and khaki slacks, his dark curly hair recently trimmed, is documenting the neighborhood a client grew up in 40 years ago. Kanfer stops after photographing from all four corners. He sends Hilden back to the van for another lens. Hilden returns with a second Hasselblad, fully loaded with film and ready to go. Kanfer resumes his work. This time, using the wide-angle lens, he lowers the tripod to just one foot above the sidewalk, bending over awkwardly to focus and shoot.

“I’m trying to re-capture her memories,” says Kanfer of his client, as he moves to the middle of the street. “I’m thinking about using a wide angle, and getting down low like when she was a child, what it would have looked like.”

Although 45-year-old Kanfer moved to Champaign from Oregon when he was a senior in high school, he considers himself a native. “When we first moved here I kept looking for an edge, like in Oregon we had the ocean, the edge of the mountains, or a view down into a valley, Chicago has got the Great Lakes. It looked like there was nothing here,” says Kanfer, grinning. “What I found out later was that our edge is like the edge of a field and we’re in a sea of corn. It’s like looking at waves of ocean. It’s the idea of imagining what’s beyond, what you can almost touch that has always intrigued me. Over the years, you start to see the beauty of the subtle things. You don’t see it right away, but after you’ve been here you start to appreciate the nuances.”

Kanfer heads north, then pivots, shooting south, toward Edison Middle School, a large square brick building on the southeast corner, surrounded by blacktop and chain link fence. “I’m imagining her walking to school and taking photographs from that perspective,” says Kanfer, crouching and shooting.

Many people who know Kanfer’s artistry might be surprised to know that he is available for hire, that he is, technically, a commercial photographer. Kanfer dismisses such labels. “Some people say you can be a landscape photographer, or a commercial photography, or a portrait photographer, but at the risk of sounding like I can or want to be all of those things, to me the lines aren’t crisp. It’s more a matter of connecting with the subject and in a sense exposing the subject — but in a positive way. That’s the challenge.”

Although his name is synonymous with “prairiescapes,” as one of his five books of collected photographs is titled, Kanfer actually has photographed a wide range of subjects. Work from southern European vistas, both coasts, and even still lifes and portraits hang in his gallery. By venturing north to Minneapolis over the last few years, Kanfer is expanding his repertoire yet again. He started out looking for a place that had more reliable snow falls and became intrigued by the very reserved and skeptical, yet very down-to-earth quality of the people there. Without hesitation, Kanfer now strides west, toward a small patch of early bulbs: hyacinths, tulips and snowdrops. Using these as a foreground he again stoops and shoots toward the street and houses. Turning to Hilden, Kanfer politely requests his telephoto lens. New lens in hand, Kanfer heads back across the street and continues shooting north, east, south and west. A few drops of rain fall. He appears unperturbed. At 7:10 a.m., less than an hour since he began, and Kanfer has finished this particular shoot.

“I think we’re set,” Kanfer says with a grin. Kanfer loved all kinds of art from a young age, and his parents enrolled him in all kinds of classes (calligraphy, pottery, painting) as a child. But Kanfer also has what he describes as an analytical side. Architecture, combining both art and analysis, drew Kanfer. He received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Illinois in 1978.

By the time he was a sophomore in college, Kanfer had focused on photography, and was trying to make money from it. He shot mostly portraits and weddings and was so determined to make a go of it that he also sold his portrait work door to door, Fuller Brush-style. “I figured a little pain was worth it to do something I loved to do,” says Kanfer of his sales efforts. Kanfer noticed that often when someone came to pick up their proofs they would remark on his other photographs, like the one titled Tornado Watch. Despite the advice of one photography studio owner, who said, “trees don’t buy pictures of themselves,” Kanfer saw a market and pursued it. These are not just any landscapes; these photographs capture how the land and the sky come together in the Midwest in a way unique to the region. “The coming together of heaven and earth is one of my favorite images,” says Kanfer.

The stereotypical artist is starving, moody and tormented. Kanfer hates that stereotype. “It’s just terrible, artists have to fight that image all the time.” Contrary to the stereotype, Kanfer’s business is thriving, and he has expanded by opening a second gallery in Minneapolis; he is friendly, smiles easily and is self-deprecating; he is happily married with two young children; and he is straightforward about what he is trying to achieve.

What exactly is it he’s trying to achieve? Connection. The artist seeks to both create an emotional experience for those who view his work and to explore the nature of people’s connections to their natural surroundings. Some of Kanfer’s most powerful photographs are almost all sky. Sometimes that sky is crystal blue, sometimes it’s full of blowing clouds, sometimes it’s painted in burning sunset colors. In the foreground, crops wave in the wind, or march in a line toward the horizon, or the fertile earth sits, waiting to be planted. The skinny, distant horizon line, where the sky and the foreground meet, ties the two elements together and captures the essence, the heart of Kanfer’s vision. It’s at the horizon where farm homes and outbuildings appear, symbolizing a fierce attachment to the land. Those buildings may be dwarfed against the sky but they are definitely, even defiantly, there.

In Between the Cracks, for example, the roiling purple sky and the blowing corn create a sense of foreboding. And then, barely visible, is a farm house tucked amid a stand of trees. In Early Corn, Kanfer captures a feeling of limitless optimism of spring. Sprouting crops head in beautiful geometry for the horizon, where again there is minute evidence of habitation in farmhouses and outbuildings. And again, the sky — this time with puffy, flat-bottomed clouds — fills more than half the photograph.

When he talks about the process of creating his work, Kanfer often talks about the sky. During one shoot, Kanfer remembers watching the clouds as the sun began to set. He recognized that the clouds were becoming more and more dramatically lit, more three-dimensional, as the sun sank. Kanfer’s normally vibrant voice becomes even more animated when describing how that photograph came to be. “I quickly got off the main road looking for compositional elements, something to use as a foreground and mid ground,” he says. “I found a field with a road and it all clicked, so to speak. I really saw all these things come together, the road and corn sort of pointing toward the sky and the heavens coming down and pointing toward the same spot, all coming together at that line on the horizon. It evoked a spiritual feeling for me, the way the natural forces (the corn) were reaching toward the sky and the sky was reaching for the earth. I had such a rush of adrenaline.”

Unlike some other photographers, Kanfer gets the same rush from selling his work as he does making it. Kanfer prides himself in offering a beautiful image for every size budget, from postcard size to 40 x 60 (suitable for corporate offices). It is not an accident that the most affordable products (postcards, calendars and his six coffee table-style books) are just inside the front door of the Champaign gallery. Kanfer has devoted considerable thought to the placement of pots of flowers at the gallery’s front door, how the light streams in from a skylight, and how the soft calming music and relaxing odors (from a smell generator) waft through the space. His assistants, Mary Jo Harvey and Julie Taylor, have been trained by Kanfer to welcome visitors at the door, give them a quick explanation of the rooms, and then retreat.

There is a special Illini room, painted bright blue (no orange in sight). The room is full of artful photographs of every campus building as well as attractive framing options. The gallery offers a graduation gift special: a frame that holds both a diploma and a Kanfer photograph. In the spring a banner goes up out front reminding passers by that a Kanfer photograph makes a lovely Valentine’s Day gift. Likewise during the Christmas season a similar banner is unfurled. “There’s always a new reason for someone to buy a print,” says Harvey, Kanfer’s assistant. The university population, both students and faculty, is a transient group. Most are bound for other places, but a Larry Kanfer print can remind them fondly of the life they had here in the Midwest. This market has provided Kanfer with customers all over the globe. With an eye to these kinds of customers, Kanfer has had a web site since the early 1990s (www.kanfer.com). He guesses that about 60 percent of the people that visit the site are from out of town.

Another part of Kanfer’s clientele are born and raised in “east central Illinois,” as the locals call it. He talks often of a particular shoot. A family home in Newman was being sold and the clients wanted to preserve their memories of growing up there. It wasn’t a grand, photogenic house and therein lay the challenge. “I asked them all kinds of questions, ‘what do you remember about the house?’ They talked about using the pump to get their water and about sitting on the porch watching the clouds coming across the fields.” Using those memories as his guide, Kanfer’s photographs emphasize the view from the porch toward the horizon and from the pump back to the house.

Meanwhile, the sun is struggling through the clouds as Kanfer begins to pack up his cameras. As he stands by the sidewalk he sees something and stops, grabbing his camera to take a final shot. “There, see those columns on the porch and how stark they are, it’s like a … what’s his name … an Edward Hopper painting. And then the tree branch slanting across breaks that starkness, just like the sun would if it were shining … see how the branch serves as a counterpoint.”

Kanfer takes that final shot, and then, finally, packs away his equipment. With a smile and a nod, he climbs in his car and drives away. Later, Kanfer develops the film and, low and behold, the Hopper-esque shot is the best of the bunch. Kanfer is pleased, but not surprised.

“That is typically what happens,” says Kanfer. “That great image is staring you in the face the whole time. It’s just a matter of seeing it.”