A Tender and Knowing Portrait of Rural Life in Wisconsin

The picture Springer eventually took of that farm school features a passel of children gathered like a choir of angels, sitting on hay bales between their school lessons, bathed in afternoon light as if in a Renaissance painting. The photographs in “Dormant Season” are black and white, but that hint of nostalgia feels representative of rural life, not feigned. Around the edges of sweet embraces, snowy footprints, and storybook farm scenes are cell-phone chargers and television antennas, hot plates and hunting rifles, acupuncture needles and DVDs. Underwear and canning jars can be seen along with drywall and sheets of plywood; nobody is wearing their Sunday best, but the laundry hanging on the line is crisp and clean. In one picture, an elderly man rests on a couch that has been made into a bed while his elderly dog does the same on the floor beside him, a stack of bedding elevating the dog almost to the man’s height. In another, a living room has been taken over by a hospital bed, but the dignified man sitting near its side rail holds a puppy as two others play on the floor.

If this part of Wisconsin is anything like the area where I grew up, then the hospital bed might have been brought there by the Lions Club, moved from house to house by volunteers as men and women recover from heart attacks, strokes, and accidents like the one Springer memorializes in another photograph of someone’s thumbless, calloused hand resting on a pillow. Maybe the Rotary Club has built a wheelchair ramp outside the front door of one picture, and maybe the boys playing beneath the field-dressed white-tailed deer in another will deliver butcher-paper-wrapped venison as part of their 4-H service project. Perhaps the floral-patterned couch, looking like a life raft with two children and two dogs crowded onto it, came from a Habitat ReStore. Springer’s photographs are so pleasing in part because they invite endless speculation about their inner logic and external relationships: which children go with which adults, whether those dark specks are tracks in the snow or birds in the sky, how fingerprints can look so much like ghosts, whether the lake is frozen enough to drive a car across it, whether the eggs are hard-boiled or poached, which farmer takes care of which fields, whether the calf is newborn or stillborn.