Carol M. Highsmith’s photograph, Rural scene, South Dakota, contains almost nothing.
And that is precisely why it works.
A single tree rises from a broad sweep of golden prairie. A fence runs quietly across the foreground. Above it all is an enormous blue sky filled with scattered white clouds. There are no houses, no barns, no people, no automobiles, and almost nothing to tell us what year it is.
Highsmith made the photograph in South Dakota on September 16, 2009.
It could just as easily seem to have been taken decades earlier.
That sense of timelessness is one of the Great Plains’ defining qualities.
A Landscape Built on Space
For people accustomed to wooded country, mountains, towns, or tightly settled farmland, the prairie can initially seem empty.
But emptiness is the wrong word.
The landscape is dominated by distance.
The land rolls gently toward a horizon that seems much farther away than it actually is. With few buildings or trees to provide scale, the sky becomes an enormous part of the scene. Weather approaches from miles away. A lone tree becomes a landmark.
That is what gives this photograph much of its power.
The tree stands almost alone in the middle distance, small beneath the sky but visually dominant because so little competes with it. It appears to have endured years of wind, drought, winter cold, summer heat, and whatever else the South Dakota prairie has thrown against it.
Whether or not the tree was meant as a symbol, it suggests endurance.
The Prairie Was Never Really Empty
The Great Plains are sometimes described as empty country, but human history tells a very different story.
Long before European-American settlement, Indigenous peoples lived, hunted, traveled, traded, and built societies across these grasslands. During the nineteenth century, settlers, railroads, cattle operations, farmers, merchants, and new towns transformed much of the region.
Eventually fences divided open land into farms, ranches, roads, and property lines.
One of those fences crosses the lower portion of this photograph.
It is an easily overlooked detail, but an important one.
At first glance, the scene may appear untouched. The fence tells us otherwise. This is not wilderness. People have shaped it as a working rural landscape while still retaining the enormous openness that defines the Plains.
Much of rural America exists in exactly this middle ground—not wild, but not urbanized either.
Human activity is present without overwhelming the landscape.
South Dakota and the Great Plains
South Dakota contains dramatically different landscapes, from the Black Hills in the west to agricultural country in the east. Across much of the state, however, prairie, pasture, ranch land, and farmland dominate the view.
In this kind of country, trees can stand out.
A tree that would disappear into the background in Arkansas, Missouri, or much of the eastern United States can become a major feature of a Plains landscape.
Trees may appear along streams, around old farmsteads, in shelter belts planted to slow the wind, or wherever moisture and soil conditions allowed them to survive.
That is one reason the solitary tree in this photograph seems so important.
In a forest, it would be one among thousands.
Here, it becomes the subject.
The Fence Matters Too
It’s easy to focus entirely on the tree and sky, but the fence deserves attention.
Those posts and wires quietly divide the landscape.
They represent property, agriculture, livestock management, and the long transformation of the Plains from immense open grasslands into privately controlled farms and ranches.
The fence is not visually dramatic. In fact, it nearly disappears.
But it changes the picture’s meaning.
Without it, we might interpret the photograph simply as nature.
With it, we see the intersection of nature and human use.
The prairie remains dominant, but people are here.
Their presence is written into the land.
Photographing the Ordinary
There is another reason photographs like this become more interesting over time.
Historical photography is often valuable because it records things that seemed completely ordinary when the picture was made.
A photographer records a street.
Decades later, people study the storefronts.
Someone photographs a farm.
Years later, people notice the tractor, fences, crops, utility lines, buildings, or land-use patterns.
A rural landscape photograph can serve the same purpose.
At first, Rural scene, South Dakota appears to document almost nothing:
Prairie.
Fence.
Tree.
Clouds.
Yet those ordinary elements record a particular place at a particular moment.
The photograph shows what this piece of South Dakota looked like in September 2009.
Someday, a photograph made from approximately the same location might look very different.
The land could remain unchanged.
The fence could disappear.
Agricultural practices could change.
Development might arrive.
And the tree itself might no longer be there.
That is one of photography’s quieter powers.
It preserves things before anyone realizes they need preserving.
One Tree Beneath an Enormous Sky
Perhaps this photograph’s greatest strength is that it doesn’t need spectacle.
There is no famous landmark.
No dramatic event is taking place.
No crowd is gathered.
The composition is almost elemental.
Land.
Sky.
Fence.
Tree.
But the proportions matter.
The tree is small.
The prairie is large.
The sky is larger still.
For generations, people living on the Great Plains have existed within that scale. Farms, ranches, roads, towns, and human ambitions can seem very small beneath a prairie sky.
A single frame captures that relationship.
A tree standing on the South Dakota prairie.
A fence crossing the grass.
Clouds moving overhead.
And a piece of rural America, on an ordinary September day, simply being itself.
Photograph: Carol M. Highsmith, “Rural scene, South Dakota,” September 16, 2009. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
