2002 CDS / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Winner
Larry Schwarm
On Fire
Larry Schwarm is Professor of Art at Emporia State University in Kansas, where he teaches photography.
Schwarm's photographs were chosen from over 500 submissions to be the inaugural winner of the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. For over a decade, Larry had made extraordinary color photographs of the dramatic fires that sweep across the vast grasslands of his native state each spring.
With On Fire, Larry joins the ranks of America's premier landscape photographers. The Times Literary Supplement described On Fire as, "a startling, mesmerizing series of photographs of prairie fires that transports us from moments of almost apocalyptic splendor to the stillness of near abstraction.... There is not a single person in these lovely photographs, just the ancient peacefulness of Nature's begin-and-cease."
National Public Radio's Weekend Edition interviewed Larry Schwarm. Visit the NPR Web site to listen to an audio file of the interview and view a photo gallery of images from On Fire.
Larry Schwarm's photographs have been exhibited widely across the United States over the past twenty years, both in solo and group shows. They have appeared in various publications, including An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography, Harper's Magazine, and Blind Spot.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Beach Museum of Art (Manhattan, Kansas), and Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence, Kansas), and is included in the PaineWebber Landscape Collection and Hallmark Photographic Collections.
He is represented by Robert Koch Gallery, Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, and Ann Stewart Fine Art.