Kyler Zeleny. Bury me in the back forty. A Personal Anthology of Small-Town Living. The Velvet Cell, 2024

Lugu väikelinna või külakoha elust - autori kodulinnast maapiirkonnas jutustatuna seal elanud inimeste ja perede saatuse kaudu. Omapäraselt kujundatud aus ja avatud raamat, mis näitab maaelu võlusid ja valusid.

Design Ricardo Nunes

Photos and spreads Kyler zeleny

Cover illustration Jeff Kulak

Bury Me in the Back Forty documents the author’s hometown, a seemingly typical rural community of just over 900 folks. Through photographs, collected objects, community archives, audio recordings, oral histories, and sketches, the idea of a prairie-town is performed. Set against the backdrop of a community history book from 1980, these documents, these private objects and souvenirs tangle to tell an intimate story of rurality. The project is both a document, an inquiry, a performance, and a transgression. It is a cartographic illusion, a community album that contains not only the roses but also the numerous thorns attached to each stem. The collective virtues and vices found at the heart of any complex place. More importantly, it is simply a story being recorded, recollected, and reconfigured—a layered portrait of rurality 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. This is not a straightforward document, it is meant to excite, awe, confuse, bore and most of all, it is meant to be revisited.

The narrative that follows is a fugitive storyline. A place where folklore and alchemy mixes with community to create a collective, albeit paradoxically disjoined, narrative of life on the prairies. A form of community particle collider, forcing narratives together, merging them, grinding them against one another until something derivative emerges, something new and indistinguishable from one another—real and imagined. These collisions inhabit an in-betweenness, an imagined community. Bury Me is equal parts time-machine and time-capsule guiding us towards one of the many fates awaiting the rural, marking its constellations, telling us when it is time for growth and more importantly when it is time for dormancy and death.

Bury Me in the Back Forty is the highly anticipated successor to the sold-out books "Out West" and "Crown Ditch" by Kyler Zeleny and the final chapter in his prairie trilogy. For a decade now, Kyler Zeleny has been documenting his hometown, a rural community on the Canadian Prairies with deep Ukrainian roots, consisting of 915 people. Based on the idea that the story 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.  

Kyler Zeleny (1988) is a Canadian photographer, educator and author of Out West (2014), Found Polaroids (2017), and Crown Ditch & The Prairie Castle (2020). He has a PhD from the joint Communication & Culture program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University. His work has been exhibited internationally in thirteen countries and has been featured in numerous publications including The Globe & Mail, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Vice, and The Independent.

Seisukord: heas korras raamat, esikaanel vajutise jälg
Formaat: kõvakaaneline, illustreeritud rohkete fotodega 
Lehekülgi: 168
Mõõdud: 216 x 265 mm
Ilmumisaasta: 2024
Keel: ingliskeelne
Kirjastus: The Velvet Cell
ISBN:978-1-908889-96-6
Trükiarv: 600 eks