Dakota Kaleidoscope

Nov 25, 2025

By Christian Begeman

I remember watching a PBS “American Masters” special on photographer Dorothea Lange and being struck by how she prepared for a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Lange’s most famous photo, entitled Migrant Mother, is one of the most recognized and poignant photos of the 20th century. As she looked through her life’s work, she didn’t choose to show just single images but grouped photos into sets of three. She described it as equating sets of three to a visual sentence. It was an idea that stuck with me, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to produce such a thing.

Earlier this year, John Andrews asked for two photos that would be considered for printing in South Dakota Magazine. The first was a winter scene in Moody County with frosted trees under a winter blue sky and the second was harvest haze at sunset in Yankton County. The dust and low light gave the image a very orange overtone. The two images gave me an idea. What if I could find other photos with strong green, red, yellow and purple tones and match them up in a six-photo set? It would be a celebration of Dakota color. It took me a couple of hours, but after a cursory review of photos from the last couple of years, I put together an edit I was happy with.

I posted the new image on my Facebook page and called it a South Dakota kaleidoscope of color. Folks seemed to like it and then John suggested it could be a new column. I agreed and started the process of searching my archives for images that emphasized a strong single color. I reviewed a decade of work from across the state. When the search was over, I had well over a hundred photos separated into blue, green, orange, purple, red and yellow folders. From there I tried to find themes. Since I photograph country churches, that became a set. The last handful of years I’ve been interested in botany (wildflowers) and macro (close-up) photography, so there were two more sets. We Dakotans know that weather and seasonality are huge parts of our lives, so there was another set.

All in all, I came up with eight more sets. The most difficult was the bird set, as there are not many purple birds. Thankfully I had photographed a purple finch at the Dells of the Big Sioux a few winters ago. I also had to choose from a lot of yellow birds. I ended up going with the yellow warbler over the meadowlark, but it was tough decision as I’m a huge fan of both species.

Thanks to John and Dorothea for the inspiration of this look back over a decade of photos. My images are vastly different than the black and white real-life photos of Lange’s, but I do wonder what she’d make of these Dakota kaleidoscope sets. I’ll never know, but it was fun to put together and show here. And really, isn’t that the best part of being a photographer? I bet she’d agree with that.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he's not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.