On Fire

"[A] stunning collection . . ." - Dave Ranney , Lawrence Journal-World

"[S]tunning images. . . ." - Les Line , Audubon

"Among the most dramatic scenes in the American Midwest are the fires each fall as farmers burn off dried grasses in their fields. Few photographers have more potently captured the power of these blazes than Larry Schwarm." - Kyle MacMillan , Denver Post

"Its pages radiant with crackling sparks, searing flames, pinkish dawns, and indigo twilights, On Fire offers a captivating photo-documentary of the prairie fires that regularly surge across America's largest tall-grass prairie. . . . The power of Schwarm's work derives from the iconographic import of its subject--fire--and also from the abstract potential of each composition. The photos make a distant, largely visual experience more immediate, tactile, and in the case of the photos of smoke plumes, even olfactory." - , Library Journal

"Larry Schwarm's color photographs of fire gnawing at the prairie have a hellish glory." - Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

"These pictures, all in color, are stunningly beautiful, displaying flames moving across vast open spaces of prairie, often as the sole link between earth and sky, photographed at day, night, and twilight, under blue skies, clouds, and the moon. . . . Schwarm's cogent afterward positions the fires as one of the four elements, along with earth, air and water, to underscore the mythic quality of the pictures and their subject. . . ." - John Pultz , Great Plains Quarterly

"Larry Schwarm’s photographs of fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later photographer trying to do better. His pictures convince us that seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious person’s life.
The photographer engages our attention first by heightening our amazement at the sensuality of fire. Most of us have enjoyed looking into a fireplace, but few of us have observed as well as he has the astonishing shapes and colors and fluidity of fire. He is so skilled in recording its appearance that occasionally we almost hear the burning and feel the warmth." - Robert Adams