Bury Me in the Back Forty is the final chapter in the prairie trilogy and the highly anticipated successor to the sold-out books “Out West” and “Crown Ditch”.

Bury Me is the long-term documentation of the author’s hometown, a rural community on the Canadian Prairies with deep Ukrainian roots, consisting of 915 people. Based on the idea that the idea of any place evolves over time, Zeleny has been using his own photographs, collected objects, community archives, and hidden histories, to revise the community’s history book from the year 1980.

The result is a pluralistic history of the community that embraces both official and unofficial accounts of events in the community’s past—a community album that contains not only the roses but also the numerous thorns attached to each stem. It encapsulates the collective virtues and vices found at the heart of any complex place on the verge of disappearing.

More importantly, it is simply a story being recorded, recollected, and reconfigured—a layered portrait of small town living that is both unique and universal. The result of which is the stoicism of place, a lived existence, which roars at times and suffers so quietly at others.

Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle documents the spaces and people of the last great ‘proving out’. The project presents the space as an understudied region, a beast upon itself, a unique meeting of landscape, industry, and most importantly, people, who are a resilient breed created by generational lessons in fortitude and fortuned circumstance.

At the turn of the 20th Century, North America’s last great land rush took place in the Canadian West. It was on the prairies that the soil made the farmer, the herd the rancher. A lingering question for the sons and daughters of the ‘last great west’ is what, or who, are we? Overshadowed and often visually conflated with its neighbour to the south, we forget to turn our gaze to the Canadian prairies. The area was settled by a unique brand of hardened frontiersmen—cowboys, ranch hands, miners, farmers, and outlaws—the dirty and determined, the persistent sludge at the bottom of every gas tank. These good ol’ boys were chasing the exalted allure of a grand landscape defined by its apparent nothingness, a landscape mystical by its inadequate representation, its mystery, and a whisper of it being the last ‘Promised Land’. The book also includes texts by Kyler Zeleny and famed prairie author Aritha Van Herk.

Found Polaroids is a collection of the best stories from the Found Polaroid Project, a personal archive of over 6,000 orphaned images collected since 2011. The concept behind the project is simple, to breathe new life into long-forgotten images by asking creative minds to write stories about them.

Eerily distant yet warmly familiar, the stories, and the Polaroids that inspired them, have a way of not only transporting us to a different time but also into the intimate lives of complete strangers. By exploring a colourful range of narratives and emotions, these images allow us to glimpse into a fictional, but paradoxically universal, a reality that can only be found through storytelling.

More than simply for storytelling, the project has also become a platform to advocate and explore the cultural importance of found and material photography as well as the iconic Polaroid. This is addressed in the book by essays from FP’s founder Kyler Zeleny, as well as Dr. Peter Buse and a preface by Dr. Lisa Jaye Young.

Materialities focuses on the importance of the photograph as a material object, a physical testament, a document of occurrence, and of a past happening. The characteristic of the photo as an object has existed since the birth of the medium itself. Photo-historians have described the daguerreotype as a mirror with a memory; not merely just an image but also an object. We create more photos than ever while printing far less than what would have been proportional a decade ago. This, a crisis of modern times, is the loss of our physical relationship with photos and the cultural subtexts embedded in the practice of possessing physical photos. It is with these sentiments in mind that we revisit and reconceptualize our current relationships to the materialities of images.

Out West is a visual travelogue documenting rural communities in the Canadian west. Over a hundred communities of between six and 1,000 inhabitants were documented. The project offers a version of the current state of affairs in the Canadian West, exploring how rural spaces experience an urban-rural time lag. The images conjure up a Vonnegut-like idea of being “unstuck in time”, where objects and the built landscape deceive the viewer as to what period they belong too.

Work from the project has appeared in exhibitions in Canada, The United States, England, Columbia, Austria, and Australia. Conference talks, as well as radio and television interviews on the work, have been conducted in Canada, The United Kingdom, and The United States. It has appeared in print in After-Image Journal, Blackflash Magazine, Aesthetica Magzine, Of The Afternoon, and Ain’t Bad Magazine. Out West was the first chapter in a trilogy about rural life in Western Canada.