'As Above, So Below': Philip Heying at Reuben Saunders Gallery
The photography exhibition captures the power of the Kansas Flint Hills. It's on view through November 29.
The creators of the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere” elected to set the show in Manhattan, Kansas, after driving through the Flint Hills during a pre-production scouting trip. Everyone in the car got quiet, Hannah Bos told me in a 2022 interview for The Wichita Eagle. She wanted to capture “this prairie that’s rolling but flat.”
Photographer Philip Heying has spent the past few years doing just that. He moved to Matfield Green, population 50ish, in August 2019 and has been photographing the surrounding landscape ever since. “As Above, So Below,” a selection of works from his Flint Hills series, is on view at Wichita’s Reuben Saunders Gallery, 3215 E. Douglas Ave., through November 29.
Heying’s subjects encompass the night sky, water systems, and wildlife, but most focus on grassland. Yet each photograph is utterly distinct. On my first visit to the exhibition, I assessed the work as the product of a great deal of looking.
Heying confirmed this in an artist talk at the gallery on November 12, estimating that he spent about 20 hours a week on the prairie over the course of five years.
Ksenya Gurshtein, an independent curator (and occasional contributor to The SHOUT) moderated the talk, and I’ve been thinking about something she said: The history of American photography has shaped how we view the American landscape. Gurshtein pointed out that 19th-century photographers William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins influenced the formation of Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks, respectively. Their work functioned as advocacy for the land they focused their lenses on.
Prairies once blanketed the Great Plains, from north Texas to the Dakotas, a region little valued for its vistas. Though you could argue that has more to do with an absence of records than with reality.
Heying’s photographs remind me of recent representations of the Great Plains on film and television (despite their utterly different aesthetic approaches). Besides “Somebody Somewhere,” there’s Sterlin Harjo’s new FX series “The Lowdown,” set in and around Tulsa, and before that Andrea Arnold’s 2018 road-trip film “American Honey.” It feels like a promising trend.
May their collective work inspire better understanding of our region and its stark and powerful landscape.
Reuben Saunders Gallery's regular hours are 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturdays.
— Emily Christensen always stops at the Bazaar Cattle Pens on I-35. She’s the managing editor of The SHOUT.
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