Burying “Bury Me in the Back Forty”

Bury Me in the Back Forty is available through CONTACT Photobook Lab and The Velvet Cell

In May 2024, photographer and educator Kyler Zeleny launched the photobook Bury Me in the Back Forty at CONTACT, concluding his Prairie trilogy, following Out West (2014) and Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle (2020).

Bury Me documents the author’s hometown, a seemingly typical rural community of just over 900 folks. Through photographs, collected objects, community archives, audio recordings, oral histories, and sketches, the idea of a prairie-town is performed. Set against the backdrop of a community history book from 1980, these documents, these private objects and souvenirs tangle to tell an intimate story of rurality.

Zeleny recently spoke with CONTACT’s festival manager, Brian St. Denis, about creating the book and its shelf-life after publication, navigating personal and performance-based photo projects, and what’s next now that this trilogy has been completed.

Brian St. Denis You've had the opportunity to get some sense of reception from both the photo community and your community in Mundare. How do you feel about the book now?

Kyler Zeleny I feel about the book the same way that I felt producing it, which is a combination of anxiety and calm towards it just being completed. It feels complete, but incomplete, like any record of a place would; it continues to evolve and grow. It’s definitely the final nail in the coffin of the trilogy. There's probably a better analogy that's less dark, but the work is kind of dark in itself, right? 

This project was a little all-consuming so I think mentally, I've kind of moved on to the next task. I still feel really good about pushing the work and have a lot of pride for it. But it's a feeling I can't really describe, a feeling that wasn't in place when the other two books were finished. I guess not every finish line feels the same and that’s ok.

I can say it's been nice to see the reception from the local community, because there was always that fear of how they will perceive it? I hoped it would be leaning more to the positive, as in, "Wow, we're a rural town in Alberta. Someone's created a book about our experience. We're not often seen." But I was also ready for a few negative comments. Luckily, the feedback has been only positive. A lot of folks that were in the book, I've got a series of pictures of them holding their spread, happily giving a thumbs up. It led to a Maclean's piece.

In terms of reviews and how folks have written about the work, especially those that are writing about the trilogy, they seem to really understand how the first two books flow into the third, and how, although they're all very different, they have a different scope. They're each trying to do something different. Each is a piece of the puzzle, and the puzzle is not finished without this final book. 

BSD Has anyone looked at it and given you a completely different perspective on it that you hadn't considered, or are readers mostly understanding it the way that you intended it?

KZ I'm not going to say it's my best book, but it's the most cerebral of the three. I think it has the most depth—

BSD —It also feels like the most personal one, which I think is maybe why you feel more anxious about it in hindsight.

KZ Yeah, it’s the book that makes me feel like myself. It's like looking in a mirror. So actually, that's a great observation. That's probably the truth of it.

Are people getting it? Well, there were cloaks and layers of mystery that are in the book. And as I put forth from the very beginning, it's not supposed to be a document that the outsider has an easy time understanding. It's supposed to be work; learning or understanding a place or community should be work. You have to invest into it! And it's possible that not everything that's in there is accessible, or really for you, but a number of things are. That's where the text also helps unearth the images.

This book should be seen as a rose, both the flower and the thorns. You cannot dissociate the two. You can try to clip the thorns, but you're doing a disservice to a flower that should be seen as both deadly and as beautiful. Even this weekend, I heard some wild stories about some guy who came with an eight-inch knife and tried to rob the Mundare liquor store, and then the owner hit him in the face with a shovel. And then in another instance there was—I’m not kidding—ten police cars and two helicopters circling a truck. All in one weekend! This place is wild. 

Small towns, I think folks really think that they're kind of backwards, but I think some of that is just a misunderstanding about what their concerns and fears are. Part of the work is just trying to understand what the complexity of this place looks like. I don't think it's too different from a lot of other small towns. Having been to many, I think you can extrapolate a lot from this one book about Mundare, about all prairie communities, and quite possibly all rural communities across the nation.

BSD I grew up in a rural community, so I'm certainly drawn to Bury Me for that reason. Comparing it to the first two books, this one has a darker, more sinister edge to it. People might not like to see that acknowledged necessarily, but I think it's important that it's part of the bigger picture.

KZ Yeah, it's there. I think to ignore it just does it a disservice, and it leads to this idea of boosterism where you're speaking only very positively about your place. That's not accurate. And I don't know who that really serves, because it becomes a communal fallacy or something.

BSD I think it shows a greater sense of love and appreciation for a place to represent both of those sides, rather than only the beauty. Most people have a love-hate relationship with where they grew up. But I think depicting that honestly comes from a place of respect or admiration.

KZ Those are both great words to describe it. It's a tightrope to not lean too heavily to either side. I look very fondly at a lot of those people and a lot of the images. And then there's ones that I think that definitely have more of a darker undertone, but still have value to understanding place.

BSD I think there's a lot more humour in it too, as a result.

KZ Yeah. The other two are less personal, they're more sociological. Bury Me was very much about being playful and creative, taking real lives from the text and putting them alongside the images that I'm taking. There’s something cyclical or circular about making work about where I grew up. This is where I was formed, my ideas, my identity, in this place where I learned to play. That was an interesting thing to do as a storyteller, to come back to not only try to understand the community, but to try to re-embrace the idea of play as an adult. 

I think these types of works are probably what we should be leaning into more in the face of AI imagery. How can we still remain artists ourselves when trying to commit ourselves to a project? I think things that are personal or performance-based are two modes for that. 

One of the great things about our medium is that it’s a great way to learn and enter people's lives. How often can a person get into a stranger’s home or space? You can do that very easily with a camera. I don't know how else to do that. AI can’t do that.

BSD Benjamin Freedman recently spoke at one of our workshops and described photography as a skeleton key to all other aspects of life, because it gives you that access. It lends you some authority in some ways. And what you do with that responsibility is really important too.

KZ Yeah, it's like an element of curiosity. So, the skeleton key is a really good reference. I don't know anything about the East Coast, but, you know, being friends with Chris Donovan, I get to know about what's going on in his city, to know what it’s like to be in an industrial town, and what does that mean to the population? I think that's pretty amazing. 

Our society is siloing at a scary rate. Living in both real and digital bubbles we generally end up congregating with folks that are similar to us. But the thing that's really great about photography is, in a general sense, is that it allows you to be in other people's lives really quickly. And so, for this book, it was also a great way to re-enter a community where you're sometimes considered an insider and sometimes an outsider. It gave me license to go back into that community, but be perceived in a slightly different way. Suddenly I’m not “Rob and Cheryl’s son,” I’m “Rob and Cheryl's son who likes to take photos.” It’s a slight nuance, but massive in terms of what the outcome then becomes. 

BSD Can you talk more about the idea of artist projects that are more performance-based? 

KZ I think that the want or need to play was something that I've been intrigued with for a while, but it didn't seem to make sense in the previous two works. One thing that I think is important to note is all three books came out of academic spaces. The first two books were made and used in more traditionally academic ways. Bury Me is also an academic text, but it really relies on this new methodology, new to me at least, called arts-based research. It was about pushing the limits of what you can make within an institution. Bury Me is a response to the other two books being overly observational, about strictly documenting. Sure, there are moments of poetry in the work and the images are visually impactful, but it didn't feel like it had the same heartbeat. I really wanted this book to have its own life or heartbeat, which in many ways mirrors the heartbeat of this town.

Bury Me was made with the intention of feeling more active and real, a discussion between the past and the present, and hopefully a way for us to figure out what the future of this town looks like, based on a collision and a merger of elements.

BSD What you said about “strictly documenting” – I talk about this analogy with a lot of people, because I find it very useful. CONTACT hosted the photographer Jason Fulford for a workshop, and he believes you can sort photographers into two groups. One group are collectors, who are largely just documenting everything they see in the world from their own perspective. And then there are sculptors who are making images that they don't see in the world. 

I was just kind of realizing that you have shifted from one group to the other. There’s still documentation but you’re staging photos, bringing more of yourself, and sculpting this image of the town. I’m thinking of still lifes like the funeral donuts image or the wasp's nest on fire. You didn't just stumble upon those scenes.

KZ Yeah, and got a lot of stings for that last one! (laughs)

BSD Do you feel with this impulse for performance and play, that you're more of a sculptural photographer? Or will you shift back and forth between those modes?

KZ I think straddling both is great. I think when people say, “you used to do x and now you do y,” even if they think x was better than y or vice versa, I don’t think that’s important. I think what’s important is in a field where we’re both trying to understand and see anew places, and a lot of it doesn’t pay, I think the first thing we should be deriving is enjoyment. Personally, the idea of pivoting to something different, which includes Bury Me in the Back 40, is trying not to make another Crown Ditch.

I think the next project or two will determine how I interact with those two concepts and which camp I sit in. I think the idea of sculpting requires more foresight. I also don't think it's something that everyone can do.

BSD What does the next project or two look like?

KZ In general, I'm kind of, sadly, losing my interest in photos. It’s not something that has been plaguing me with terror, it might be an ebb and a flow. Maybe I just need a break from it. I was in the States for a while last year, and I just couldn't find that underlying energy that drives someone to produce work that, at least until it's produced, no one gives a shit about, right? It's the easiest thing to not do. I don't know if we need any more Route 66 shots. I don't know if we need any more dilapidated middle-America images, I think we have enough. I'm hoping that this new project, which is going to be about demolition derbies, is something that's going to reinspire me. 

The first year would be about documenting, trying to understand the culture of this very rural event where they build up cars only to smash them. I think that's very fascinating. I’m enthralled by this idea of modern metal gladiators twisting steel against one another until one rises victorious. 

The second year is all about me building an actual functioning demolition vehicle and then entering it in a demo so that the process becomes the practice. And I can't think of a better way to be more performative than to potentially put myself into a position where I can get a concussion. I think that sounds pretty good and it might just be the closest thing to art I’ll ever do.

BSD Performing in the stadium!

KZ I am also looking to possibly reshoot my first book, Out West. In one sense it’s nice to change and grow. I also think it’s possibly nice to go back to the roots and go back to the project where I felt the most youthful and elated to be engaging with the medium of photography. Your first project is very special. It’s been 10 years now. I like the idea of trying to advance one project and also returning to a formula that worked and made me happy, and I can do them simultaneously. 

Maybe I am kind of bound to doing projects about the Prairies. Maybe I've stamped myself onto that landscape, and the landscape has stamped itself upon me to the degree that I can't really produce quality work elsewhere. We also have a complete lack of producers here in the Prairies. So maybe it's a good thing to stay and try to put down that stake and build something, and hopefully others will want to build as well.

Final copies of Bury Me in the Back Forty are available through CONTACT Photobook Lab and The Velvet Cell.

Kyler Zeleny (b. 1988) is a Canadian photographer, educator, and author of Out West (2014), Found Polaroids (2017), Crown Ditch & The Prairie Castle (2020), and Bury Me in the Back Forty (2024). He holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Alberta, a master’s in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a PhD from the joint Communication & Culture program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University. His work has been exhibited internationally in twelve countries and featured in numerous publications, including The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, The Washington Post, VICE, Maclean’s, and The Independent. He now lives a prairie-based life.