My Dakota started out as a photographic exploration of South Dakota, the sparsely populated frontier state on the Great Plains where Rebecca came of age. She was trying to capture a more intimate and personal view of the American West. She was trying to capture what all that space feels like to someone who grew up there. The next year, however, everything changed for Rebecca. One of her brothers died unexpectedly of heart failure. “For months, it seemed all I could do was drive through the badlands and prairies and photograph,” she writes in the book’s afterword. “I began to wonder—does loss have its own geography?” she adds. My Dakota—which interweaves her spare text and lyrical photographs—is a small intimate book about the West and its weathers, and an elegy for a lost brother.