Preface | Introduction | Afterword

Preface by Willard ScottAfterword by Paul Mobley

This book began almost four years ago in a small coffee shop in northern Michigan, near my family's cabin in Glen Arbor, my longtime refuge from the intensity and demands of my life as a commercial photographer and city-dweller. I'd been shooting professionally for fifteen years almost non-stop and for the first time I was struggling to find the creative energy and sense of purpose that had faithfully fueled me throughout my career. I hoped that a lazy summer of sunsets on the lake with Suzanne and the kids would be a rural remedy. It's just a different way of life up there, and I liked spending time at the local places, like the farmers market or the coffee shop—where I'd always find a group of guys from the area, farmers mostly, talking about nothing and everything, you know, solving the world's problems over a cup of coffee. I was up there one morning with my friend Doug and I remember looking across the table at this line of weathered, salt-of-the-earth faces, and I just knew, in that moment, that I wanted to photograph those faces. I have no idea why it hadn't struck me the hundreds of times I'd sat there before. But I asked one of them if I could come by the farm and take his picture later that day. And I can still remember looking through the camera and thinking, This is the most pure, honest photograph I've ever done.

By the end of the summer I had taken portraits of a couple dozen farmers in and around Glen Arbor. I had no idea at the time that they would represent the first of 300 farmers I would photograph in thirty-five states, leading me to travel over 100,000 miles during the next three years. If someone had told me then that that's what the project would entail, I'm sure I wouldn't have done it. But those pictures had ignited something in me, and I just started putting one foot in front of the other.

I knew right away that I was stepping into a whole new way of working. After years of shooting with large crews and tons of expensive equipment, I traveled as lightly as possible from state to state, farm to farm, most often without an assistant or even a tripod. The camera had always been my god—the key to unlocking a successful photograph. Now it became just a tool, a means to simply document what was there, and in many ways the least important ingredient in the image-making. I'd arrive at each farm and spend as much time as possible getting to know the farmer and his family—listening to their stories, walking their land, sitting down together for a meal—before even taking my camera out of the car. "Pre-production" was no longer about setting up lights and styling the subject; it was about studying the constellation of wrinkles on each farmer's face, the way his eyes lit up every time his granddaughter's name was mentioned, and how his jaw tightened when he recalled the loss of a calf that had to be pulled the night before. By the time I picked up the camera, in many ways the picture had already been taken.

I embarked on this project as a photographer in search of artistic evolution, and I found it. But the exquisite and unexpected discovery was of a kinder and gentler world and way of life than any I had known before. The agricultural communities of America are made up of modest, hardworking men and women who prize their families, their land, and their heritage above all else. With every farmer and rancher I met, I was newly astonished, humbled, and deeply inspired by the generosity and warmth shown to me. I often felt that I had stepped into a fantasy, where freshly baked pies sat cooling on kitchen sills, backdoors were never locked, and neighbors relied on each other for as little as a cup of flour and as much as a hand with their summer branding. There was something about the way every time I'd pull up to a farm and six great dogs would bound out to greet me and someone would call out from the house, "C'mon in, the door's open." The doors were always open.

Time and again I was invited to stay for supper (it's never dinner, you know) or offered to have my gas tank filled up or given a bed for the night if I needed one. In New Mexico I remember getting ready to leave a farmhouse pretty late in the day, and as I made my good-byes to the farmer and his wife, she said, "You know, you're welcome to stay the night. We made up a room for you just in case." And as I turned to thank her, I saw through an open doorway just beyond where she stood—a single bed already turned down, and on a little table next to it was a plate of three cookies and a handwritten note card that read, "Paul." And I just thought, How can I ever tell someone about this? They'll never believe it; they'll think I made it up. But here's the barely exaggerated truth: I have a story like that for every single farmer in this book.

So many times when I was traveling, I wished my wife or a friend were with me to experience these moments of grace. But I needed to do this alone. There's a truth in these photographs that I believe owes itself to the directness and the simplicity of each encounter. It was the real human connections and quiet initiations of friendship that unlocked the potential for what these photographs could be, and opened me up in the process.

Entering into this rural culture, this family of farmers, had revived my own sense of spirit and optimism. Like so many of us, I doubted the existence of this kind of goodness in the world. You look around at the ways we treat—or mistreat—one another, and it's gotten so out of hand. You want something you can believe in. You ask yourself, Where have all the good people gone? Well, I can tell you. Drive up to any farmhouse in this country. You'll find them. They're there.

And they're here. In the pages of this book, you meet hundreds of America's farmers and ranchers and see them just the way I did, and just the way they are. I'm no longer standing in a field of wheat or lying on my belly in a cabbage patch every day, but as I write this from my studio, I am surrounded by images of many of my farmer friends. And each one has left their lasting mark on me. There's a warm meal and a bed waiting for me anytime I need it in almost every state in this country. I wish everyone could know exactly what that feels like.

Please refer to the menu to the right for further details on Paul Mobley's "enertaining, heartfelt, humorous and inspiring" AMERICAN FARMER Program.