Andrew Buck : Photographs

A N D R E W B U C K

Rockface

My point of departure is the landscape, but always a landscape we have created, intentionally or inadvertently. I believe that what is of greatest interest in the landscape is what we do with and on the land, what remains and what happens after we leave it.

An emphasis on abstraction has always characterized my work. This focus is most evident in the Rockface series, the most purely abstract work I have done. By eliminating any evidence of scale in most of them I try to highlight the abstract form.

While these images are primarily about abstraction, they are also concerned, to a degree, with how our presence in and impact on the natural landscape creates an entirely new landscape. All of the rock faces I have photographed were created by blasting through hills for construction and for granite and trap rock quarrying. These new landscapes are not understandable in terms of either humankind or nature alone: while they have been created by non-natural processes, the natural structure of the rock has determined how and where they have fractured to create the newly exposed surfaces.

We drive by these walls nearly every day without noticing them. But the form, pattern, structure, and even mood present in them could be said to present a challenging beauty.

Ohio Horizon

Photographs from Northwest Ohio

The glaciers that covered much of North America during the last ice age scraped nearly perfectly flat a huge area that includes most of Northwest Ohio and western Lake Erie. Much of this area evolved into The Great Black Swamp. It covered about 1500 square miles, forming a vague triangle stretching from Port Clinton, Ohio to Fort Wayne, Indiana and back to Toledo. It was so impenetrable that few attempts were made by anyone to even traverse it, let alone ‘develop’ it. During the so-called Toledo War in 1835-36, a conflict between Ohio and Michigan over the location of their shared border, the two militias were unable to find each other because of the swamp’s impassibility! The first known effort to clear a few acres was made around 1811, on the edge of the Sandusky River. This triggered a 100 year effort of draining the entire swamp into Lake Erie. It was a gradual process, done by incredibly motivated individuals. The only endorsement from the government came in 1859 when a series of state ‘ditch laws’ were passed that laid out the grid of ditches. The result is still some of the richest, and flattest, farmland in the Midwest.

The grid of ditches, along which most existing roads were built, forms rectangles a quarter to one mile on a side. Nearly all of these images were made looking across the rectangles, i.e. at least those distance from their subject.

After spending time in and photographing the area for a number of years, I realized that this was a subject that could only be captured and described accurately by using a technique of radically restricting the view, essentially eliminating the foreground and sky, thereby concentrating on what’s out there. Art Sinsabaugh, after struggling over how to photograph rural Illinois, and only after living in Champaign-Urbana for a while, found the heart and spirit of the Midwest landscape by reducing the field of vision to the thin strip of the horizon. My intent in this series was not to copy his work, not to make new Sinsabaugh-esque images. But, after a similar struggle, I came to the same realization.

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My wife's parents moved to Woodville in the early 1990s, less than 5 miles from Luckey, where my mother-in-law grew up. My wife's brother moved to Pemberville in 2002, 6 miles from Woodville. Many images were made either from or of my mother-in-law's cousins' farms. Without this connection, I probably never would have had the opportunity to do this work.

Tobacco

These photographs are from one of the shade tobacco farms of the Connecticut River Valley. Reputedly, the best cigar wrapper tobacco in the world is grown in this area. Hence, the nickname for the valley is "The Tobacco Valley".

With this series, my intention was to remove any connection to the political and social issues related to tobacco in order to reveal the form. Initially, I used ‘normal’ photographic formats to concentrate on the abstract angular geometry and volumes of the forms and spaces. The 360 degree panoramas go even further, transforming the barns and covers into almost unrecognizable shapes. While panoramic images present a complete image of an environment, they also break it down into separate, even more abstract elements.

In the late 1980s, when I started working on the series it became an effort to document the farms before they disappeared, which seemed inevitable at the time. In fact, quite the opposite happened.

The Farmington River

It is improbable that even a square foot of Connecticut land has not been overturned or, at the least, cleared at least once if not repeatedly in the last 300 years. Just as the natural landscape itself is both temporary and permanent, so are the results of our efforts to create our own environment within it. So, while photographing the Northeast landscape is not simply the act of capturing the beauty of nature, neither is it just showing the results of ‘man destroying nature’. It is more a matter of seeing the current state of an environment in constant change, change brought about by our attempts to maintain a hold on the land and by that hold being eroded by continual natural processes.

Early Work

What can I say: cutting my teeth, getting used to using a view camera, seeing what things look like when photographed. In short, across the board experimentation. I was part of a small community of photographers in Syracuse that eventually lead to the formation of Lightwork, lead by Phil Block (now at ICP) and Tom Bryan (now of Boom Boom Mex Mex!). We were all innocents, devouring everything we could find: Weston's Daybooks, Minor's Mirrors, Harbutt, Frank, Strand, Evans (both), Stieglitz, etc., and pouring it right back out in silver. What a time.

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