Author and photographer Drake Hokanson looks to the broad American land, its places, people and stories as subjects for his photographs, books, exhibits, and essays.

His photographs, most often black and white, are of ordinary things and places conditioned by human use, things made powerful by the inquiry of the camera. His subjects range coast to coast and include highways, small towns, ordinary landscapes, grain elevators, agricultural fairs, the Mississippi River, and the people who call such places home.

"For me, photography is best employed in the study of places, ideas, people, to illuminate fragments of the glorious, palpable, sensory world. Unlike any other art—opera, painting, or fiction, for instance—photography has the power to reveal distant things and events in a concrete, specific way. When my work is at its best, there is no need for suspension of disbelief; every tiny thing within the image is clear, unmanipulated, in focus, specific, and invites the close attention of the viewer. Opera distills emotion to its purest form; painting makes visible that which cannot otherwise be seen; fiction explores the breadth of human existence—and photography makes the world real."

Mississippi River Mile 729, Heading Upstream Toward Fountain City, Wisconsin 8/16