This documentary series of photographs moves progressively westward, beginning at the Missouri River crossing, where oxbows form the platforms for the city of St. Joseph, and ending where the two lanes of Route 36 disappear into Interstate 70 at Byers, Colorado, within sight of the Rocky Mountains. These boundaries demark the specific geographical region of the Western prairie, characterized by low annual rainfall and diminishing vegetation. The area has a particular expansiveness and quality of light that paradoxically feels timeless while revealing its obsolescence and decay. In Route 36, Wylie beautifully captures this quality of light in approximately one hundred photographs, making use of a fine-grain film to record detailed textures within the vast spaces. En route, he draws out relations between the dry, flat landscape and stark, vertical structures. In Wylie's images, buildings often present blank faces, abandoned without names or signage, former uses unspecified; they sometimes appear as depthless surfaces against the deep expanse of prairie. Moving through the collection, we recognize this tension as characteristic of the region and its moment in history. Wylie presents these photographs as a catalog, assembled into a collective portrait of place, such as Eugene Atget did with Paris, and Walker Evans did in the American South.