The Badlands

“I was totally unprepared for that revelation called the Dakota Badlands. What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere.” 
— Frank Lloyd Wright

Despite it being a seemingly inhospitable place, people have lived in the Badlands for thousands of years; the first humans arriving in the area around 11,000 years ago. As nomadic hunters and gatherers, they were probably among the early arrivals from Asia across the Bering land bridge.

In more recent times the Dakota Indians, the Sioux, ruled the area using the remote Badlands as their stronghold against the U.S. Army. The Lakota people refer to the harsh environment and rugged terrain as “mako sica” or “bad lands.”

These photographs were made in the Badlands of South Dakota and are part of an ongoing project.

"… a technical wizard like Keith Taylor deserves a shout-out just for the prowess evident in his platinum-palladium print "Rain Cloud, The Badlands", an evocation of turbulent sky and rocks that has the brooding intensity of a 19th-century photogravure."