When the Coen brothers' dark-comedy film classic Fargo came out in 1996, my wife Brenda and I were living in Shreveport, Louisiana.  We had been in the South for four years at that time but we still had very good friends back in Minnesota where the film's story was to have taken place despite its title.

For those who have seen the movie and have forgotten, and for those who have never had the pleasure of viewing this iconic misrepresentation -- but very funny -- of Minnesotan speech, manner and culture, the story was actually set in Brainerd, a town smack-dab in the middle of the state several hundred miles from the North Dakota/Minnesota border city identified in the film's title.  Some of the characters in the story lampoon the sometimes exaggerated Midwestern accent typified with phrases like "you betcha," "fur sure," and the many-meaning "yaaah." 

On the phone with our friends back in the land of sky-tinted waters (the English translation for the Dakota Indian word Minnesota), we were aghast at the fun us Minnesotans were made of in the film: we heard from the other end of line, "Yaaah! Can you believe it.  We don't talk like that."

Well, yaaah...we do I guess.

Minnesotans do like to poke fun at themselves however.  If you don't believe me, just listen to Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion radio show sometime or read Howard Mohr's book "How to Talk Minnesotan." 

I spent the first 38 years of my life living in Minnesota, and another three and a half when Brenda and I returned in the early 2000s from our first tour of duty in the South.  I had the good fortune of discovering photography while living in the state (ironically while attending college across the Red River of the North from of all places Fargo, in Moorhead), then attending J-school at the U of M and capturing on film a sense of the area.

In this photo-essay are photographs made from the late 1970s to 2002, encapsulating images of the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth, the farm land, the Iron Range, the forests, the lakes and rivers, and some of the people that are Minnesota.  It is not a definitive look at the state which is more complex and diversified that its famous stereotyped speech patterns.  It is just one Minnesotan's view.

Yaaah!