When Witt returned to the United States, he decided to pursue a career in photojournalism, and he began working for a weekly paper where he “wrote all the stories and took all the photos” for around $100 a week. His photos helped illustrate Afghanistan’s history and the character of its people. His photography eventually found its way into 1981’s The Struggle For Afghanistan, which documented the Russian invasion and the Afghan mujahideen’s resistance. “I used my cameras discovering and learning about this completely new world, this totally new culture,” he said. He spent most of his free time snapping shots of local people and landscapes on 24 rolls of slide film. In 1973, Witt decided to join the Peace Corps, and he was sent to Kabul, Afghanistan, during a time of political uncertainty in the region. In his late childhood, Witt said, he found an old rolling-film camera gathering dust in the attic and began teaching himself how to shoot photos. I grew up with a sense of the beauty of nature and its integrity and also what happens when it has been trampled and ground up by the greed machine.” Other times, they had been completely despoiled. Some of them we would find still as beautiful as he remembered them. “Every so often, my father would just get a yen and say ‘Let’s take a ride,’ and we would go sometimes very deep into the countryside to places that he had known as a kid. “My father loved the outdoors and the beauty of northeast Iowa,” he said. His love of nature goes back to his time growing up in Clayton County, Iowa. “I wanted to give people something to meditate on and appreciate and maybe even share some of my sense of enchantment about being on prairies,” he said. Witt uses photos that he has taken of Iowa prairies over the course of 30 years to paint an image of how Iowa’s landscape has changed. “The natural world of Iowa is worth celebrating and saving just as much as the Amazon rain forest - though the Iowa prairie is far more depleted.” “Enchanted by Prairie is a beautiful book that inspires awe for our local native Iowa landscape,” said Sarah Walz, a member of Friends of Hickory Hill Park.
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