When photographer Jerome Liebling arrived in Minnesota from his native New York City in 1949, he was a young man of twenty-five launching what would be nationally recognized as a distinguished career in fine art photography. Here, in 118 photographs, is portrayed Liebling's Minnesota. During two decades marked by social, political, and cultural change, Liebling traveled the state and found his largest subject—the depiction and interpretation of commonplace human experience. The images range from the grain elevators and skid row of Minneapolis to the slaughterhouses of South St. Paul and the poor, working-class streets of St. Paul's West Side; from the Iron Range and the Red Lake Indian reservation in the north to the farming towns in the south. The vision of Minnesota that emerges from these extraordinary photographs is uniquely that of the artist, yet it leads viewers effortlessly to an enhanced understanding of the place, the times, and, always, the people.
