Hopefully by now you’ve seen pictures from some of the Occupy movement rallies. They show average citizens energized, angry, and marching. But what about the rest of the time? What do protestors do when they’re not protesting? How do you sustain passion for a cause when you’re living it 24/7?

I had the chance to go to the Occupy STL camp in Kiener Plaza and was moved by what I saw. It’s not just some conclave of dirty hippies or college students trying to skip out of class. It’s a group of people inspired by the events of the Arab spring who want to bring similar economic changes to our country. To take back the American Dream from corporate greed by raising awareness and by demanding reform in the next election cycle. How do they do this? By more than just marches. They host general assemblies, economic seminars, film screenings, and they issue policy statements. At 1:00 pm on a Tuesday the crowd was sparse, but to quote one of the organizers Paul, “We may look like we don’t have anyone here, but there are hundreds of thousands of people behind us.”

[cincopa AIEAuxaDJUMS]

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The 160-acre family farm is a thing of the past. While just 40 years ago, many square miles of the Iowa landscape were divided into farm quadrants, today’s family run farm is about 1,200 acres. As a young photojournalist in the early 1970s—a city kid from Baltimore who knew nothing about farming—I had an idea for a project to document the fast-approaching end of that small-farm, small town, one-room-schoolhouse era.

Conveniently for me, my wife’s family owned a 160-acre farm near Tennant, Iowa—a tiny town about 30 miles east of Council Bluffs. Like others living in that four-family-per-square-mile world, theirs was a life of hard work and dedication to family and community, and I wanted to document the way things were then on the farm and in town. It was like an anthropology project: you knew it would never be there again, so you wanted to capture it as best you could.

What you see here are some of the images that came out of that project.

Epilogue

In November 2010, we sold the farm. Two months later, we came back to see the old place. The home and outbuildings documented in these images had already been completely razed and replaced by a cornfield.

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