Midwest Prairie Medicine is a photographic and healing arts documentation project focused on medicinal plants native to the Iowa and Nebraska tall grass prairie. The project is rooted in environmental urgency; less than one percent of Iowa's original tall grass prairie remains. The plants documented here — species that sustained human and animal life on this land for centuries — are increasingly rare, poorly understood by the public, and largely absent from mainstream visual culture.

Each plant is photographed in closeup detail against a black background, inviting the viewer to look closely for details. The result is a personalized portrait of each individual plant..

This work began as a relationship to the land in which my roots come from.

For twenty years I have worked as a fashion and portrait photographer — shooting people in San Francisco, New York, and internationally, building a career around the human face and form. I enjoy it and I am good at it. I understand light, presence, the moment just before someone reveals something vulnerable and honest about themselves. While that is still very alive for me, I feel the slow turning toward a subject that begs to be seen in my homelands.

Post pandemic, I came back to the Midwest, to the ancestral lands my family is rooted in. Leading me even closer to nature. I wanted to share this deep healing the land gave me. Through a creative spark, I concepted a photography audio meditation experience that could be used anywhere as an oracle deck, or utilized large scale in clinical settings. I followed that inspiration to the prairie and began turning my camera on medicinal plants. It was not a pivot. It was a return. The same attention I have trained for twenty years on human beings, I am able to give to the organisms that have been here long before any of us: the goldenrod, the Eastern red cedar, the wild bergamot growing at the edge of the field. I want to see them the way I have learned to see people — fully, with my attention held long enough for something authentic to come through.

I live and farm now in northeastern Iowa in a landscape shaped by tall grass prairie that has been nearly erased by big ag fields. Iowa is currently #2 in the nation for cancer and the midwest is suffering from chronic rheumatism and other nervous system disorders due to the glyphosate used on the fields. The plants that remain — the ones that grew here long before humans, that fed and healed and oriented generations of people to this land — are still here, persisting. Most people pass them without recognition. I have became obsessed with understanding their medicine.

Midwest Prairie Medicine grew from that obsession: working intimately with these plants, photographing them at large scale, and researching their healing traditions. The project asks what it would mean to offer these plants and their medicine back to people — not as specimens, not as nostalgia, but as living stories. The medicine is not only botanical. It is perceptual. It is energetic. To slow down and truly see a plant is already a healing act.

Each botanical print in the Midwest Prairie Medicine series is built from four integrated elements:

Botanical Photography Each plant is photographed against a pure black ground using studio lighting and professional photography equipment, creating images of extraordinary detail and quiet intensity. Printed at institutional scale — up to several feet across — these are not illustrations. They are portraits. Each one is designed to stop a viewer in their tracks and hold their attention long enough for something to shift.

Plant Medicine Text Each print is paired with written content in four sections: The Plant (ecological and cultural context), Plant Medicine (traditional and historical healing uses), Simple Practice (an accessible, embodied exercise the viewer can do wherever they are), and Reflection (a contemplative invitation for personal inquiry).

Bioelectric Sound: The Voice of the Plant At the sonic foundation of each piece is the living voice of the plant itself. Using a device called PlantChoir — which reads the subtle fluctuations in electrical resistance moving across a plant's surface and translates those signals into audible tones — each species generates its own continuous sonic presence. Goldenrod sounds different from Eastern Red Cedar. White Pine carries a different rhythm than Fern. This technology makes audible what has always been occurring just below the threshold of human perception: the living intelligence of the plant, expressed as sound.

This bioelectric audio forms the ambient ground of each plant's audio experience — the actual voice of the organism itself.

Guided Audio Meditations Layered over the bioelectric sound is a 2–4 minute guided audio meditation composed specifically for each plant species. Drawing from the ethnobotanical heritage of the Iowa prairie, each meditation illuminates the healing traditions, ecological identity, and contemplative qualities long associated with that plant. They are written as intimate encounters — an invitation to breathe with something ancient, to remember the larger living system the body belongs to.

Conceptually, audio meditations are accessed via a headset when checking in at the clinic or via QR code linked to each oracle card, making the full layered experience available in any setting.