Portrait of America’s Heartland

Rick Gerrity photographs local personalities in Iowa’s Albert City with his Tamron 35-150mm F/2-2.8 VXD zoom.

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By Jenn Gidman
Images by Rick Gerrity


For the past few years, Rick Gerrity has been traveling the country in a truck with more than 500,000 miles on it, seeking high and low for tiny towns off the beaten path for his “Photographing America” project. His most recent stop: Albert City, Iowa, established in the late 1800s and originally named Manthrop, after a town in Sweden. “The place was founded by Swedes, which is why the sign you see welcoming visitors to town says ‘How Swede It Is!,’” Rick explains.


35-150mm (35mm), F/9, 1/2500 sec., ISO 500
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From a local turkey farm to bee farms, custom furniture sawmills to grain elevators, Albert City offered Rick a glimpse into a town deep in America’s heartland, steeped in industry and agriculture. But it was the locals who most often appeared in front of Rick’s camera, as they do in most of the destinations he visits. “I met some incredibly interesting people in Albert City, which was my goal,” he says.

Rick exclusively used the Tamron 35-150mm F/2-2.8 Di III VXD all-in-one zoom lens on his Sony mirrorless camera system for this trip. “This lens is absolutely perfect for me for this type of project,” he says. “I can capture wide landscapes in low light thanks to the F/2 maximum aperture, take beautiful portraits of the people I meet, and then capture headshots or close-up detail images. With the 35-150, I can zoom out to capture a sunset silhouette of a grain elevator, then zoom in to take a portrait of a boy and his prize goose. That lens is a godsend.”

One of the first people Rick had the pleasure to meet during his weeklong stay was World War II veteran Alvin “Stub” Lindquist, set to turn 103 this December. “Stub survived the attack on Pearl Harbor,” Rick says. “I had such a wonderful conversation with him—his memory is still incredibly sharp and he can recall everything about that day. He told me, ‘The first 100 years were rough; the next 100 are going to be really rough.’ Stub sits on his front porch, and folks in the neighborhood will stop by and chat with him. I was able to zoom in to 92mm with that lens and open up to F/2.8 to blur out the background, so you could really concentrate on the character in his face.”


35-150mm (92mm), F/2.8, 1/1000 sec., ISO 400
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On the other end of the age spectrum was Cooper, the son of a local farmer. “They have a really big family, and Cooper’s dad calls their farm a low-rent zoo,” Rick says. “But Cooper is especially interesting. He raises bees—I brought a jar of honey home for my wife—and he also enters his pet goose in state fairs and other competitions. You’ll often see Cooper walking the goose around with a harness and leash. I really wanted to capture an intimate portrait of Cooper and his prize goose, which he was happy to pose for.”


35-150mm (56mm), F/8, 1/1000 sec., ISO 400
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Rick chatted up and photographed as many other people as he could during his short stay, including the owner of the local junkyard in front of an old pickup truck—“I feel like I stepped back into the ‘50s when I see that photo”—and a pastor who turned out to be a camera buff. “He had this really cool antique camera that I've never seen anything the likes of,” Rick says. “I had him hold the camera in the doorway of the church, and I was able to blur out the background just enough so that my subject popped, but yet you could still clearly see his environment.”


35-150mm (35mm), F/4.0, 1/160 sec., ISO 400
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35-150mm (40mm), F/2.8, 1/250 sec., ISO 3200
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One of the most colorful characters Rick met in Albert City was Scott Herrig, who owns one of the area hog farms. “He takes care of all of the cats that come around,” Rick says. “There have to be about 50 of them, which he feeds every morning. He comes out and throws handfuls of food on the ground and gives them some milk. They sit there and wait for him—when he’s driving around, you’ll see dozens of cats following his car. I thought this photo was neat, as I caught him ‘in the act,’ so to speak, during feeding time.”


35-150mm (64mm), F/5.6, 1/400sec., ISO 640
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A visit to a 150-foot-tall Albert City grain elevator offered Rick a bird’s-eye view of the town, and even more insight into the Midwestern way of life. “The facility holds several million bushels of grain, corn, and soybeans, and the grain then gets sent across the way to the renewables plant, where it gets processed into ethanol,” he says. “To get to the top, I had to ride in a tiny one-man elevator that was smaller than a phone booth, with my guide following after me. He gave me a full history of the grain elevator and how important it was to the town, which we could see sprawled out below us from up high. I had to capture a silhouette of the grain elevator and Albert City’s skyline, because it’s just so integral to life there.”


35-150mm (116mm), F/11, 1/8000 sec., ISO 125
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