Crop Art at the 2025 Minnesota State Fair

My son and I were in the horticulture building before it was open on the opening day of the Minnesota State Fair last Thursday. I was entering cherry tomatoes (I ended up earning a 3rd place ribbon!), and the drop off was 6:30 a.m. through 9 a.m. when the building itself didn’t open to the public until after that.

So we had the opportunity to do something amazing: look at the “crop art” with NO ONE else around! Usually that room has a huge line, and it’s packed with viewers during normal fair hours! Here are a few pics:

[click each image to enlarge]

My son and about 1/3 of the crop art, before all the building lights were even turned on.

I had a good time explaining some of the “art puns” that were being made with some of the crop art. For example: here we see “Girl with a Pearl Earring” portrayed as a squirrel, as well as “The Son of Man” shown with a corn dog instead of an apple:

"American Gothic" with the 2 MN State Fair mascots, Fairchild and Fairborne.


"Saturn Devouring His Son" but with a corn cob.


Another version of "The Son of Man"


"The Birth of Venus."


"Migrant Mother" - one of the most famous photographs of all time!


"This is not a corn dog" which is a take on "The Treachery of Images,"
and you can see it won an award from the Minneapolis Institue of Arts!

'Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits'

I started reading this biography on a trip this past winter:

I saved a few quotes from it. Here are 2 from the introduction that I particularly like:

Most of Lange's photography was optimistic, even utopian, not despite but precisely through its frequent depictions of sadness and deprivation. By showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she called attention to the incompleteness of American democracy. And by showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she simultaneously asserted that greater democracy was possible.

And here's a bit about "documetary" photography and representation:

The camera's capacity to replicate what the eye can see made it appear, originally, to be the ultimate documentary tool. It seemed to be a machine for exact replication, its products machine-made, until the myriad means of constructing photographs were widely understood. Invented just as art steered toward expressing a subjective vision, an individual inner consciousness, the camera seemed limited to representing that which is visible to the naked eye. Honoré Daumier said that "photography described everything and explained nothing." Photographers engaged in some self-delusion along these lines; Walker Evans called documentary "a stark record ... [of] actuality untouched." Lange did not fuss about exact representation in her photography. Her experience as a portrait photographer left her at ease in retouching an errant hand or shadow, in asking her subjects to move to a different spot or position. Like an historian, she wanted her photographs to emphasize what she saw as the main point and to prevent her viewers from being distracted by details. In her portrait studio she wanted to reveal the inner, not the outer, life and character of her subjects, and she continued the search for hidden truths in her documentary work.

Dorothea Lange on Cameras

Purchase a print of this here.

The Camera

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

- Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange: "Altering Life"

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

- Dorothea Lange

It's great to hear the photographer who made (what most people consider) the most famous "documentary" photo ever speak of photography "altering life." I love it. It makes me feel better for using Lange as a prime example in my MFA Thesis entitled "What's so Documentary About Photography?"