Raymond Bial
Author & Photographer

My work as a writer and a photographer has grown out of my love for the farms and small towns of America. I spent several joyous years of my childhood in a small town in Indiana. I vividly recall bicycling around the neighborhood, swimming at the municipal pool, and stopping for ice cream at the local hotspot. Later, when I was ten-years-old, our family moved to a farm in Michigan. I missed my hometown, yet I loved taking care of the livestock and exploring the woods, marsh, and fields. The moment I walked out of the house I was truly outside in the light and weather. The land was bursting with wildlife, and I became the delighted naturalist. I was thrilled to be alive, deeply experiencing the world around me, and thought about becoming a wildlife biologist.

I bought a small plastic camera by collecting Bazooka bubblegum wrappers and sending fifty cents to a distant post office box. During my spare time, I photographed scenes around our farm. So, I also thought of becoming a photographer. Then again, in fifth grade, I wrote a story, which was published in our little mimeographed school newspaper. In blurred purple ink, the story wasn’t much, but my teacher and friends really liked it. A small flame was kindled within me, and I began to think that I might want to become a writer. Children often ask me, “When did you become a writer?”

I always answer, “When I wrote the story in fifth grade.”

Children also often ask, “Who most inspired you to become a writer and photographer.”

“My teachers,” I always respond.

Every one of my elementary school teachers kindled my intense love of learning, especially history, geography, and literature. Several of my teachers also strongly encouraged me to become a writer and artist.

Other people also helped me along the way. After seventh grade, when I was thirteen, I went to work for the summer, baling hay for a neighboring farmer— a fine, cheerful, hardworking man. I came to admire him so much that I decided to become a farmer. However, that August our family moved back to Illinois, and I was devastated. I deeply missed my old home, the farm and my many friends there. Luckily, I was again blessed with several fine teachers, who encouraged me to work hard. In eighth grade, I won a local writing contest, which strengthened my interest in becoming an author. In high school, I wrote stories for the newspaper and enjoyed history and English classes, in particular. I then went on to the University of Illinois, where I was again inspired by several distinguished professors. They taught history and English with such fervor that I could not help, but be impressed by their example.

At this time, I also considered becoming a teacher, although I was “supposed” to become the lawyer in the family. My mother had long encouraged my three brothers, my sister, and I to go to college and enter a profession. My older brother planned to become a dentist, and one of my younger brothers was slated for a career in business, while my youngest brother and sister intended to become teachers. It appeared sensible that I become a lawyer—except that I was only mildly interested in pursuing this career. I was accepted into law school at the University of Illinois. After long and careful thought, however, I decided to forego law school. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, only that I had come to a crossroads in life.

After graduating from the university, I reasoned that I would work for a year or two, then settle on what I would do for the rest of my life. I still had to earning a living so I accepted a job and moved to the East Coast. While I was away, I soon came to realize just how much I longed for the geography of home. Vividly, I recall flying home for Christmas and walking along the tree-lined streets of our small town. The snow came down so quietly, filling up the streets, glittering against the street lamps, that I was overcome with the beauty of that moment.

The next day I borrowed a camera from my brother and drove the back roads, swaying with the pitch of the land, absorbing the subtleties of light, the fields brilliant with snow, the sky so phenomenally blue. I made my first photograph—of a barn riddled by wind—and several others. These scenes were so remarkably lovely, beyond words that I had to find some way of sharing my feelings about them with others. I was also struck by the changes that had occurred in the region during the few years since I had left for college. When I went back east the memory of those two episodes—one on a hometown street muffled with snow and the other in the country—stayed with me. These scenes were so remarkably lovely that I had to find some means of sharing my feelings about them with others.

Thereafter, on every visit home, I took drove the back roads, wandering through the countryside, often taking photographs. I sought to capture the vanishing rural landscape, making photographs of fence posts stacked in a woodlot, of gas pumps in front of a grocery store, of a broken cafe window. These first photographs were in color, but I quickly came to appreciate black and white images, notably the ability of the interplay of light and shadow to evoke a distinctive mood through which I could both document a subject and express myself. My photographs were meant to be art, with significant content, not just because they were carefully made, but because they evoked profound feelings. As much as I was fascinated by the pulse of city life, I also loved to return home to wander the back roads, observing the subtleties of light, and seeking those subjects that had mattered to me so much in my youth. The plains swept relentlessly in every direction, with scarcely a lull for a streamed, or a rise for a line of trees to interrupt the eye. The sky appeared to overwhelm the land and I seemed to be the least significant object on the horizon. Yet I was captivated by the velvety black fields, dappled with troughs of snow, and the height of the sky.

I often say that photography and writing “happened to me,” just as dreams come to us. I did not consciously decide to become a creative person. I had long harbored a quiet wish to become an author. During my early twenties I wrote stories and articles, all in a lyrical, highly visual style. I briefly attended graduate school in journalism, but longed to be creative. So, I moved back home, where I immersed myself in the countryside as I sought to become both a writer and photographer.

Forsaking a safe, relatively comfortable profession as teacher or lawyer, I became the “starving artist,” working in factories and on farms. I yearned to become an accomplished writer, but wasn’t sure if I were best suited to poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. I also sought to become a photographic artist, but wasn’t at all sure what that meant. As a friend of mine once observed, artists are the only people who must declare themselves “artists” before they have a body of work to substantiate the claim.

I describe these early years at length because they had such a pervasive influence upon my work as an author and illustrator of children’s books. During this period in my life I honed my skills as a photographer and made a commitment to creating works of enduring value. Self-taught as a photographer, I carefully studied the work of master photographers—mostly through books checked out of the local library—yet I also insisted upon my own unique style that blended strong documentary and creative elements. Also self-taught as a writer, I simply read one library book after another, admiring Mark Twain and other great authors, but seeking my own voice.

Over the next few years, I published a few more stories and articles. I loved to write fiction, but it was my photography that came to be enthusiastically received from the very beginning. However, it took me a while to accept this “gift” as I continued to work on my writing. I apparently had an eye for photography, and I have a few exhibits. My black and white photographs were also collected in several books, mostly small editions, published by university presses.

When it finally occurred to me that I might apply my skills as a photographer and writer to creating fine books for children, my first editor asked me, “Where have you been hiding yourself?” I answered that I had simply devoted myself to a long apprenticeship making black and white photographs before I turned my attention to writing and illustrating my first two children’s books: Corn Belt Harvest and County Fair. I also explained that anyone who can make good black and white photographs understands light and can make color photographs with ease. In fact, I bring to my children’s books the same technical expertise, artistic sensibility, and lyrical feeling regarding light and composition that distinguished my work for adults.

I have since published more than eighty books for children and adults, all of which are intended to be both lovely and useful. For many of these books, such as Amish Home, Shaker Home, Portrait of a Farm Family, A Handful of Dirt, and others, I have been drawn to the rural and small town life that I love so deeply. I believe that adults as well as children should live fully, not only in their minds, but through their senses. So, just as when I was young, I still love to be outside, only now I’m earnestly making photographs, capturing that heightened sense of feeling for people, places, and everyday objects.

In recent years, I have broadened into other interests in American cultural and social history. In this area, I have published Frontier Home, Shaker Home, The Underground Railroad, Mist over the Mountains: Appalachia and Its People, With Needle and Thread, Where Lincoln Walked, One-Room School, Ghost Towns of the American West, Tenement: Immigrant Life on the Lower East Side, and Where Washington Walked.

About seven years ago, I embarked on a signature series about Native American people entitled “Lifeways.” The photo assignments for the twenty-eight books in this critically-acclaimed series have now carried me far from home. I once came back to my home in the heartland to make photographs, but now I travel all over the United States and Canada to visit Indian tribes and make photographs of the people in these places. In this grand undertaking, I have visited the forests of the East and South, the sweeping plains and mountains of the West. I have traveled to the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. Many times I have journeyed to Montana, but I’ve also been to California and Washington, as well as Alaska and the muskeg of northern Canada. In all of these varied locales, I have been honored to meet many wonderful people.

Never one to shy away from work, I’ve also published a set of five books called “Building America.” Including The Canals, The Farms, The Forts, The Homes, and The Mills, this group of books shows how people worked hard to settle various regions of the United States. Recently, I’ve published Where Washington Walked and am working on a book about Nauvoo and several other projects.

In the research, writing, and photography for all of these children’s books, I have been concerned with several primary elements. Essentially, I have been devoted to a quest for excellence in writing and photography. As a serious writer and photographic artist, I have committed myself only to those projects that have mattered deeply to me. Furthermore, I have only published books for which I have felt a compelling need to learn more about a particular subject or better understand another culture. I have also insisted upon high production values in editing, design, and printing. Fortunately, my editors have been dedicated to the same principle: that children deserve the very best.

The most important and satisfying aspect of publishing children’s books has been that they have been appreciated. In fact, although technically classified as “children’s books,” my books have been enjoyed by young and old alike. As “crossover books,” they may be read to young children by parents, teachers, and grandparents. Children in the middle grades can read them in groups or on their own, and adults are drawn to the books because they enjoy the photographs. They may also read the books when they want an introduction to a particular subject.

Over twenty-five years ago, I married a lovely and wonderful woman. Linda and I now have two daughters and a son. Over the years, as our children grew up, I told stories to them our on our screen porch or in the backyard, as night eased over the neighborhood—just as my grandfather once told stories to my mother and her friends out on the porch.

Even as I published photo-essays, I have always loved to write fiction and was especially pleased that many of these “porch stories” were published in The Fresh Grave and Other Ghostly Stories, which was dedicated to my daughter Anna who also made the black and white illustrations for the book. Anna also created the striking illustrations for a short novel entitled The Ghost of Honeymoon Creek, a sequel to The Fresh Grave. This book was dedicated to my daughter Sarah. To be fair to all of my children, I am now working another book in this series, which will be dedicated to my son Luke. Although fictional, these ghost stories are rooted in my experiences with my mother and grandfather, as well as my youth in small towns and farms. My next work of fiction, a scary novel entitled Shadow Island, will be published in the spring of 2005.

For the past seventeen years, Linda and I have lived in an old house in a mid-sized, Midwestern town, where we’ve raised our children. Above all else, I love being a husband and a father. For me, the only thing better than being a child is to grow up and raise children. In making books, I now draw upon experiences with my children as well as youthful memories. I do my writing at home in the midst of my family. We also blend photography assignments with vacations so that we can be together as a family. So, I am able to write and make photographs, enjoy my family, and lead a purposeful life. Who could ask for anything more?

all photographs