Category : Nebraska

Nebraska's two cities give a photographer the same raw material in two different arrangements: nineteenth-century brick warehouse districts, a handful of serious institutions, and an enormous amount of sky. Omaha's Old Market and Lincoln's Haymarket are both former wholesale and rail districts, which means heavy brick, loading docks, cobbled service streets and buildings built to be worked in rather than looked at.

Those districts photograph well for a specific reason: the streets are narrow and the buildings are low, so low sun runs right down them at the ends of the day instead of being blocked by towers, and the brick returns a warm bounce that is flattering as long as the white balance is set for it rather than left automatic.

The Nebraska State Capitol deserves to be singled out. It is not a domed classical building like almost every other American statehouse — Bertram Goodhue's design is a four-hundred-foot tower rising from a low square base, finished in the early nineteen-thirties, with heavily decorated vaulted interiors. It is one of the most distinctive public buildings in the country and it photographs unlike anything else in this library, with deep mosaic-and-marble spaces that are considerably darker than the eye reads them. Outside, the plains assert themselves.

There is very little relief, so the horizon is low and true, and the sun sets close to the time the tables say — which, after a library full of ridges and hills, is a genuine convenience. The trade is weather and wind. Summer afternoons build big convective storms that are magnificent behind a couple and catastrophic twenty minutes later, and the wind is close to constant.

Golden hour on open ground here is long and low and very good, and it is the best thing either city offers; the guides that follow say where to stand for it, venue by venue, and what each interior needs when the light has gone.