Earl Iversen | American, 1943 -
Earl Iversen is an American photographer whose work examines the social landscape, vernacular architecture, and visual culture of the Midwest, particularly Kansas. Born in Chicago in 1943, Iversen studied communication design at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, receiving his B.A. in 1970, and earned his M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1973. He also studied photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago during the late 1960s. After teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art, Iversen joined the faculty of the University of Kansas in 1974, where he became Associate Professor of Photography and is now Professor Emeritus.
After moving to Kansas in 1974, Iversen began an extended photographic exploration of the state and its distinctive social and built environment. Working primarily in black and white, he photographed small towns, Main Streets, roadside signs, fairs, rodeos, parades, sporting events, vernacular architecture, and other manifestations of everyday Midwestern life. His photographs are characterized by a direct, observant approach and an interest in the often unexpected relationships between people, architecture, signage, landscape, and regional identity.
In 1976, Iversen participated with Garry Winogrand, Terry Evans, Mark Goodman, and other photographers in a major photographic survey of Kansas that resulted in the 1977 project Kansas Album. Iversen's contribution concentrated on the symbols and structures through which the character of the state revealed itself. His work from this period belongs to a broader reassessment of the American social landscape taking place in photography during the 1970s, while remaining distinctly rooted in his fascination with Kansas as both a place and a culture.
In 1983, the Spencer Museum of Art organized Terry Evans and Earl Iversen: Kansas Photographs, an exhibition devoted to their contrasting approaches to the region. Whereas Evans concentrated on the prairie and its ecology, Iversen turned his attention toward people and the environments they constructed and inhabited. Over subsequent decades he also developed a sustained interest in grassroots art environments, photographing idiosyncratic, self-built sites in Kansas and elsewhere, including S. P. Dinsmoor's celebrated Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas.
Iversen's photographs have been presented in one-person exhibitions at Harvard University, Colorado Mountain College, the University of Dayton, and the Sioux City Art Center, among other institutions. His work was also included in The Great West: Real/Ideal, a nationally touring exhibition circulated by the Smithsonian Institution in 1977.
His photographs are held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.