Walt Whitman placed our midwestern prairies and plains ahead of more dramatic sights like Yellowstone or Yosemite, celebrating the wide spaces as "North America's characteristic landscape." When photographer David Plowden traveled from his native East Coast to the Midwest, he was stunned by the landscape Whitman described. In the years that followed he became enthralled with its vastness and wildly changing skies, and this album presents some of his finest photos made there over the past few decades. Here are 65 superb black and white images with powerful visual rhythms—gently rolling fields and plowed furrows, upright grain silos and elevators, receding highways and railroad tracks—formally presented on single pages with white borders.