How would you represent your favorite place visually?
Contribute a photo or digital image of your favorite landscape/place and we’ll put selected images up in our gallery throughout the summer. We’ll also display all contributed images on our website’s 20/21 Conversation page.
Take Kansas Highway 4 out to the rim of the prairie or travel the high road along Skyline Drive to where the hills flow into each other and the wind constantly moves.If the space feels different than it ever has before. If you see a hawk balanced on top of a high place. If you notice the grasses bending a certain direction. If you see a tree and wonder why it is there. If you stand alone in the prairie sea and hear the whisperings of tall grass. If you have a sense that none of it and all of it is yours. And if, in the early morning or late evening light, you are privileged to see purple in the hills—then you will have seen my prairie.
My favorite place in Lawrence is Martin Park. To get there you take Folks Road to what used to be a Christmas tree farm. Then you take a right. It’s not a very big park, but it’s completely wooded. Once you get in, you park your car. Cars can’t drive on the path. You can just walk through and you’re in the woods walking wherever you want. Since there’s hardly ever anyone else there, you really feel like you’re in a secret garden that’s untouched. People use the park sort of as a hideout space. I like that there’s a sense of solitude when you’re there, and that you can get there in three minutes: three minutes to solitude. Margaret Perkins-McGuinness / Lawrence, Kansas
I think about sustainability when I look at these landscapes. Are we affecting the land so much that we can't maintain the changes we make to it? Or, are we being realistic about our ability to acclimate to the needs of the land? In this photograph, I look at the dirt, gravel road and it's bend up and around the hill. We have cut a path, but we haven't paved it. There's a sense of collaboration here. Not domination.
