Prairie: Load Bearing
Prairie: Load Bearing is a photographic study of the American grasslands as a working surface — land shaped not by spectacle, but by pressure, repetition, and use.
Made along ranch roads, feed corridors, fence lines, and wind-leveled fields, these photographs observe how labor settles into the landscape. Machinery idles. Animals cluster. Structures hold. The horizon remains constant while everything within it is under strain. These are not scenes of action, but of duration — moments when effort has already occurred or is about to.
Across the Plains, systems persist even as the conditions that sustained them shift. The work looks at continuity as a form of labor: what is maintained, what is structured, what continues to bear weight.
The prairie is not vacant. It is carrying something.
Prairie Load Bearing is a fine art photography series by Eric Stein exploring the American prairie as a working landscape shaped by agriculture, infrastructure, and time. Photographed across rural regions of the United States, the series examines cattle, machinery, weather, and land use as visual evidence of systems under tension. These large-scale color photographs focus on minimal compositions, open horizons, and subtle human presence to document how labor and environment intersect across contemporary rural America.