Bull rider and farmhand Rusty Caudle, North Liberty, Iowa, 2003

Snow storm, Hills, Iowa, 2004

Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews praying, Postville, Iowa, 2003. Lubavitchers bought a closed meatpacking plant in Postville, converting it into a kosher slaughterhouse. The plant has revitalized the community and drawn immigrants from Latin America and Russia.

Allen Miller drags a young doe from the woods while hunting with family and friends near Kalona, Iowa, 2005. Allen, who is New Order Amish, has eight siblings; like other large families living in rural Iowa, the Millers use deer meat to offset food costs.

The 2006 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography biennial prizewinner is Danny Wilcox Frazier, a freelance photographer who also teaches at the University of Iowa. His black-and-white images of rural Iowa were selected from four hundred entries in the third First Book Prize competition.

Robert Frank, one of America's most important and influential photographers, judged the competition and chose Frazier for the prize because of his "passionate photographs without sentimentality…his work reaches out: let me tell your story, it is important."

"Frazier's work will survive," Frank wrote, "his book will be the foundation for more to come… Frank will write a statement for the book, Driftless: Photographs from Iowa, which will be published in fall 2007 by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies.

Frazier, who has a master's degree from the University of Iowa, has received awards from the University of Missouri's Pictures of the Year International, including their 2004 Community Awareness Award, for selections of his work from Iowa. He was also awarded a Stanley Fellowship in 2003. An image Frazier made at the University of Iowa on September 11, 2001, was part of the National Museum of American History's show "September 11: Bearing Witness to History." This collection of photographs of Midwestern rural culture will be his first book.

"During winter in the Midwest, one can drive along endless gravel roads divided by windblown fields of black earth as dark as tar," writes Frazier of the world he depicts in his arresting black-and-white photographs. "Snow drifts along fencerows, leaving the landscape a harsh contrast of black and white. But the feeling of openness that so defines the Midwest's rural landscape is being replaced by one of emptiness. This work sheds light on people and places often ignored by mainstream media. As the economies of rural communities across America continue to fail, abandonment is becoming commonplace; these photographs document the human effect of this economic shift."

Frazier made these powerful photographs over a three-year period. "Ultimately, many rural communities across the Midwest will die," he writes, and "in some ways the pictures I have made simply document the process." Frazier has immersed himself in the collective experiences he photographs—in the lives of people who continue to find comfort among friends and family in small communities, and meaning and purpose in the enduring traditions and customs which mark the seasons. His interest in rural issues is rooted in his own life as he was raised in a small Iowa town that sits on the Mississippi River, not unlike the places he reveals through his images.

Poetic and dark, but illuminated with flashes of insight, Frazier's imagery has a brilliance of feeling. One turns away from his photographs feeling the heartbreak of our shared loss, for this is an America all of us are losing.

Don't miss On The Ground in Iowa. Danny Wilcox Frazier tracks the presidential campaign as it snakes it way through his home state.