Quiet Main Street on a Sunday Chauvin, AB 2016 © Kyler Zeleny — *Quiet Main Street on a Sunday Chauvin, AB 2016* © Kyler Zeleny

Kyler Zeleny’s latest photo book, Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle, is a documentary study of a space and people that in many ways seem to be untouched by time: the rural Canadian West and the folks who call it—or rather, who made it—their home.

Miniature Church Drumheller, AB 2016 © Kyler Zeleny — *Miniature Church Drumheller, AB 2016* © Kyler Zeleny

The meticulously composed plates do not present a series of subjects that were obviously shot in the 21st century. Thus, the question posed by the Canadian researcher and photographer in the book’s brief foreword, “what, or who, are we?” seems not only apt but vital.

Given Zeleny’s upbringing on a farm in Central Alberta, the work he’s done here is a sort of anthropological participant-observation (though no less artistic for that fact.) The consequence of such an approach is that the series is less about framing a prepackaged, readymade narrative than it is about clarifying a mysterious one. So just what exactly is it, then, that we uncover about this place that Zeleny refers to as the “last great west”, and these people he describes as “the persistent sludge at the bottom of every gas tank”?

Of course, there is an immediate sense of toughness, ruggedness, and experience. Of all the human subjects who become fodder for Zeleny’s lens, only one is a child. The rest are middle-aged at best, but skew elderly—folks into whose faces time has carved its furrows deep and deeper. Most of them are tan from a lifetime of laboring in the sun. Every caption specifies an occupation, thereby contextualizing the people in terms of the work they do (even if they’re retired.) And the gentleman on page 28 (“Farmer outside bar”; Manville, AB; 2015) is missing not only a handful of teeth, but an eye.

farmer outside bar Manville, AB 2015 © Kyler Zeleny — *farmer outside bar Manville, AB 2015* © Kyler Zeleny

Beyond this hardened surface, however, Zeleny has captured something deeper, and unequivocally profound: an imperturbable sense of contentment, enough-ness. The intersection in the first image is simple and empty, but the road is wide. The churches are small, but clean and proud. The entertainment (a demolition derby) is dirty and un-technological, over which cumulus clouds billow and fold into an iridescent sky. The numerous grain silos, elevators, and harvested fields bespeak a replete bounty. And as tough as they appear, most everyone—even the one-eyed farmer—is smiling, calmly, rather than ecstatically.

Ultimately, the subjects of this project seem less to have escaped that glacial process of change than they seem simply to be unconcerned with it. And it is that stoicism—not a victory achieved despite their labor, but a consequence of it—which comes to figure centrally in the answer to the question that incited the project in the first place.

Looking for dinosaur bones Wayne, AB 2015 © Kyler Zeleny — *Looking for dinosaur bones Wayne, AB 2015* © Kyler Zeleny

There is something utterly unpretentious and unselfconscious about the world that Zeleny has documented. Even the overturned sedan on page 33 seems unagitated, as unresistant to its fate as the foothills rolling in the distance beyond.

The people in these images radiate a certain type of quietude, an acceptance of necessity wrought not by fear, futility, or helplessness, but by having worked hard enough to have encountered their true human limitations, limitations so stark and undeniable that one encounters them not with frustration or shame, but with satisfaction. They have pushed themselves as hard and as far as they can go. They have been all the way to the edge, where they can now sit, rest, and dangle their legs over.