Iowa

Nancy Rexroth's Iowa is one of the founding books of toy-camera photography: a body of blurred, square-format images that turned the Diana camera's cheap plastic lens into a deliberate tool for picturing memory and place.

Photographed in rural Ohio in the early 1970s, the pictures are named for a childhood idea of Iowa that Rexroth carried from summers spent there as a girl, not the state itself. The camera's soft focus, vignetting, and light leaks give screen doors, barns, and empty fields the quality of something half-remembered rather than seen. Violet Press first self-published the book in 1977 with an introduction by Mark L. Power. Iowa was among the earliest photographic monographs built entirely around a toy camera. This University of Texas Press edition, issued in 2017, expands the original sequence with twenty-three previously unpublished photographs. It reprints Power's introduction alongside new essays by Alec Soth and Anne Wilkes Tucker.

Rexroth studied photography at Ohio University, where professor Arnold Gassan introduced her to the Diana camera in 1969. She later taught at Antioch College and Wright State University. Her photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Cincinnati Art Museum. Iowa remains a reference point for photographers working with plastic-lens and toy cameras.