Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul, 1976

Home: Tom Arndt’s Minnesota is a book forty years in the making. These thirteen black and white images by the native Minnesotan are selected from among the 100 plates in his new book, what he calls “a poem to my home state.”

Minnesota is a beautiful place if you can appreciate flatness and don’t require intense conversation or jaw-dropping glamour. We don’t do so much of that here. We spend a good deal of time waiting for something to come along and usually it doesn’t.

—Garrison Keillor, from his Foreword to Tom Arndt’s Home

Bicentennial fete, Browerville, 1976

Out the bus window, Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, 1974

Portrait of a young woman, Minneapolis, 1977

Mother and Child, Kenosha apartments, Minneapolis, 1973

Waitress, lunch counter, Minneapolis, 1974

Como Park, St. Paul, 1975

Aunt Fud and Candy’s doghouse, Fergus Falls, 1973

Kids, Duluth, 1978

Linda, Minneapolis, 1967

Cheerleader, Patrick Henry High School, Minneapolis, 2006

Kids at the Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul, 1979

Precious, Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul, 1984

All photographs © Tom Arndt, from Home: Tom Arndt’s Minnesota. Foreword by Garrison Keillor, Introduction by George Slade. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.