NEWS

His quest to photograph 'Forgotten Iowa' unearthed heart of Trump's America

Kyle Munson
The Des Moines Register

DES MOINES — When Cody Weber began to focus his camera lens on the vacant shopfronts and sagging front porches of rural Iowa, he didn’t expect to peer straight into the heart of the wounded pride and lost economic opportunity that became fertile political ground for the rises of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right.

Cody Weber of Fairfield has photographed more than 400 Iowa towns in his quest to capture images of every community in the state.

But in Weber’s quest to photograph all 945 or so towns in what he calls “Forgotten Iowa,” that’s precisely what happened.

“I was always speaking as someone who came from a town that was on the decline, and it made me angry,” said Weber, 28, who grew up in the far southeast corner of the state, along the Mississippi River in the struggling manufacturing center of Keokuk. “But as I’ve traveled through these counties and I’ve realized very quickly that it’s endemic, it’s not just an isolated incident with the county that I’m from.”

2000 vs. 2016: Why Gore then is different than Trump now

Weber and his girlfriend, Kat Kanan, routinely set out from their Fairfield home and so far have chronicled more than 400 towns. Along the way, Weber has amassed 400,000 images that have filled a pair of six-terabyte hard drives.

Eldorado, Iowa.

I first wrote about Weber a year and a half ago when the launch of his project generated a little buzz. I was intrigued by this young, freelance photographer who had dedicated himself to exploring the same territory I cover.

Who was this guy with the crazy scheme to linger on our barren main streets and zoom in on the weather-beaten lumber and crumbling brick of our small-town landscapes?

Doesn't the typical millennial join the great migration of young professionals to a major metro, or at least to downtown Des Moines, where they can find yoga classes and craft beer in abundance?

Kat Kanan poses in downtown Keokuk.

But Weber chose to stay and scrutinize, and all his time on the road seems to be giving him a more nuanced view of his sparse stomping grounds. He recently wrote a heartfelt, perceptive new essay — a manifesto? — titled “What I have learned from photographing 400 (and counting) Iowa towns.” He was surprised to see it picked up by a center-right politics and culture publication, Arc.

“Rural America has taken a real shot to the gut in the past couple decades,” he declares in the first sentence. “What once was the pride of American industry and economy has since dwindled to its nadir.”

Weber goes on to describe the fading fortunes of the rural working class, which “set the stage for the political and socioeconomic civil war that we seem to be constantly waging today.”

Wadena, Iowa.

He also gets personal, writing about how his grandfather, an Army veteran, was able in the 1960s to land a stable job at the steel mill and rely on it for 35 years.

But by the 1990s, Weber’s father suddenly lost his manufacturing job at a local box plant, when a foreign company purchased the factory and moved it to Mexico.

If that sounds like a line or two cribbed from a Trump stump speech, Weber happens to be one of those die-hard young Sanders disciples.

"I know this is going to sound super pretentious and naïve,” Weber said, “but (Sanders) is the only politician that I ever listened to that truly affected me on a fundamental level. I had like chills down my spine because he was reiterating things that I had been feeling for my entire life. And that can be tied right back to the Donald Trump supporters: I’ve spent my whole life waiting for a politician to say these things, and there’s finally one that does. And I guarantee that same visceral response is what the Donald Trump supporters, by and large, are feeling as well.”

Pence says he and Trump 'reserve the right' to challenge election

In setting out to discover "Forgotten Iowa," Weber unwittingly rediscovered his own childhood self-portrait. He writes about how, after his father's layoff and his parents' divorce, the family slid into poverty. So although in the article he goes on to call Trump a "liar" and an "orange charlatan," his psychoanalysis of his fellow rural Americans is an entirely empathetic one. He implores readers to speak to the residents of these small towns with "open hearts and minds."

"It’s almost like the rest of the country is out to get you," Weber writes of the worldview of many of the rural Iowans whom he has met. "It’s you versus them and, at least historically speaking, they are winning by a landslide."

Cody Weber, a self-portrait.

Weber also describes Iowans as friendly, compassionate, smart and creative — qualities that are harder to capture within a snapshot where these people might be set against what looks like a bleak, lonely backdrop.

“If there’s word that I would use to describe Iowans as a whole," he said, "it’s just ‘perseverance.’ Because I feel like no matter how bad things get in a lot of these communities, and some of the communities are in a really bad state, people still find a way to find the good in them, and I think that’s really important.”

Weber isn't even halfway finished with his project, and already it's churning up a deep well of emotions from within.

For now, he must be content with this intangible payoff. Kanan recently tabulated receipts and calculated that she and Weber have spent some $16,000 on their passion project. Their last stop was Webster County. Up next is Allamakee County, where a benefactor has “sponsored” them by chipping in for hotel and gas.

Fairfield, Iowa.

The couple has launched a modest GoFundMe campaign to try to buy a used RV and slice hotels out of their budget.

Weber also gave his first live interview this week on radio station WHO-AM 1040, which yielded a flood of emails with recommendations of what he should photograph next. The more he sets out to survey what has been forgotten, the more Iowans seem willing to help him remember how these towns once thrived, and to encourage him to imagine what may yet be possible.

“I’m helping giving a voice to people that feel like they’re not represented at all, and I like that feeling," Weber said. "It’s a good feeling to have.”

All the better that Weber isn't asking for anybody's vote. All he needs to do his job is unvarnished scenery and available light.

Follow Kyle Munson on Twitter: @KyleMunson