Bury Me in the Back Forty is the highly anticipated successor to the sold-out books Out West and Crown Ditch by Kyler Zeleny and the final chapter in his prairie trilogy.
For a decade now, Kyler Zeleny has been documenting his hometown, a rural community on the Canadian Prairies with deep Ukrainian roots, consisting of 915 people. Based on the idea that the story of any place evolves over time, Zeleny has been using his own photographs, collected objects, community archives, and hidden histories, to revise the community’s history book from the year 1980.
The result is a pluralistic history of the community that embraces both official and unofficial accounts of events in the community's past—a community album that contains not only the roses but also the numerous thorns attached to each stem. It encapsulates the collective virtues and vices found at the heart of any complex place on the verge of disappearing.
More importantly, it is simply a story being recorded, recollected, and reconfigured—a layered portrait of small town living that is both unique and universal. The result of which is the stoicism of place, a lived existence, which roars at times and suffers so quietly at others.
Kyler Zeleny
Kyler Zeleny (1988) is a Canadian photographer, educator and author of Out West (2014), Found Polaroids (2017), Crown Ditch & The Prairie Castle (2020), and Bury Me in the Back Forty (2024). He holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Alberta, a master’s degree from Goldsmiths College, in Photography and Urban Cultures and a PhD from the joint Communication & Culture program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University. His work has been exhibited internationally in twelve countries and has been featured in numerous publications including The Globe & Mail, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Vice, Maclean’s, & The Independent. Prairie living now occupies his time.
kylerzeleny.com
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