Photographer’s Gallery: Iowa : Madison County Moments

When author Robert James Waller created a hero for his best-selling novel, “The Bridges of Madison County,” he came up with a fictional photographer named Robert Kincaid who went to Madison County, Iowa, to take pictures of the state’s famous covered bridges for National Geographic. There he met Francesca Johnson--and the rest is publishing history. The book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 146 weeks and has now become a movie of the same name (Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep play the main characters in the film, which opens Friday).

Robert Kincaid and Francesca Johnson may have been figments of Waller’s imagination, but the Madison County town that he used, Winterset--population 4,200--is very much a real place and is, in fact, the birthplace of John Wayne. Since the publication of “Bridges,” thousands of tourists have flocked to the area to see the simple, red wooden bridge that served as the backdrop for the four-day romance between Robert and Francesca.

The book got New York-based photographer Judah S. Harris to wondering what Kincaid might shoot if he were given a National Geographic assignment today. “I went out in search of pictures that he might have taken now,” Harris says. “I wanted to capture a sense of place--the people, the setting, the real Madison County.”