There are 99 counties and more than 900 towns and unincorporated communities in Iowa.
And for the next few days, the country’s eyes are trained on the people and towns of this state as it kicks off election season in America.
But what does Iowa look like, away from the campaign buses and the town halls?
An amble through Cody Weber and Kat Kanan’s website Forgotten Iowa is like going on a virtual road trip through Iowa. The project, launched in winter 2014, is an attempt to photograph and document every single town in Iowa.
Weber says he began the project as he started exploring his own genealogy and discovered his ancestors had lived in the same pocket of Iowa for more than 100 years. From that, the endeavor grew to include the entire state.
Weber and his girlfriend have criss-crossed the state, stopping at towns with names like What Cheer and Promise City.
So far, they’ve visited more than 300 towns.
Weber grew up in Keokuk, Iowa, and now lives in Fairfield. He says the towns he’s most drawn to remind him of the one he grew up in.
“The town has seen better days,” Weber says, describing Keokuk. “The backdrop to my entire childhood are these buildings. So I think I find myself naturally inclined to them.”
He is drawn, he says, to towns where, “buildings just remain untouched by time. The further east you go, the more you see this.”
Towns such as What Cheer, Iowa — an old coal mining community. “There were coal mines and they mined out the coal, and they built up a fairly nice community, and then they moved to the next town. And that town just sat there, these towns lack funding.” Weber explained.
The desolate towns, the communities that are growing smaller as people move to cities — those are the parts of Iowa he’s trying to capture.
“It’s the same story over and over again, you have these communities that are bleeding people, they’re all heading to cities as we urbanize,” he says, “So the whole idea of small town America is falling to the wayside.”
Weber isn’t the only one who’s tried to document and capture the disappearing magic of small town Iowa.
William Whittaker at the University of Iowa photographed 213 Iowa towns between 2007-2013. According to the project website, the motivation for Whittaker’s project came from the fact that “most small towns in Iowa are dead or dying…this project attempts to record what is left of the downtown business districts of Iowa.”
Another project called Iowa Backroads boasts more than 10,000 photos of 900 communities in Iowa taken between 2008 and 2011.
For Weber, photographing Iowa is more than just buildings and desolate towns. Along the way, he has started talking to and taking portraits of locals he meets.
When asked about the people he’s met, he describes a retired park ranger, an artist who makes art out of animal bones, a 96-year-old bodyshop owner, a man who planted 30,000 pine trees himself.
The Iowa Weber hopes his photos portray is one that’s “more than just tractors and cornfields. What makes Iowa special is the communities and the people.”
In an ode to small town America, the characters and communities he’s capturing are the ones “that you drive by on the interstates.”
“It’s kind of a love letter to the state,” he says.
