Surveying The Farmland
American
Landscape Photographs by Andrew Buck at the University
of Rhode Island Photography Gallery
Connecticut based Andrew
Buck is a thoughtful and highly accomplished interpreter of American farmland,
landscape that he defines as fully responsive to the human presence. In this
exhibition of powerful panoramic landscapes of
Alternatively, Buck is
enthralled with the pure geometry of the man-made American barn and he composes
images allowing his viewers to appreciate its humble yet majestic “signage”—its
blocky, angular integrity as a pivot onto the agricultural landscape of
"My focus has
always been the landscape," Buck Says "My use of the term ‘landscape’
is based in the writings of John Brinkerhoff Jackson. His use of the term went
back to the source word, the German Landschaften,
which referred to that which results when ‘man’ reconfigures and uses the land,
in essence creating his own landscape on the natural landscape. Jackson, and
others, have proposed using the term ‘cultural
geography’ to refer to observing this aspect of the land."
As SURVEYING THE
FARMLAND will attest, in many ways Andrew Buck deeply admires and pays homage
to the influential American photographer Art Sinsabaugh (1924-1983). Sinsabaugh
had revived the use but redirected the subject matter treated traditionally by
the incredibly heavy and awkward “banquet” camera. Such cameras were previously
associated with securing a broad yet detailed view of a scene such as a banquet
or other large portraiture gathering.
Rejecting its associations
with commemorative photography for large groups of people, Sinsabaugh directed
his banquet camera toward landscape iconography and in the 1960s created
now-legendary panoramic vistas of the
Even more than Sinsabaugh’s, Buck’s images
cultivate a sense of human intervention visible in the landscape and
interpreted photographically with great sensitivity. Buck’s distinctive
landscapes appear in always surprising ways to reference human design, whether
in land reclamation projects for
Moreover, the thin
horizontal panoramic photograph, which by definition collapses our “window” on
the world, is Buck’s distinctive format. It conjoins elements near and far,
left and periphery, as well as left and right, top and bottom. The apparently
all-encompassing format serves to establish unanticipated correspondences on a
number of levels both in form and content. Viewers will be excited to discover
the ability of the panorama to convey the artist’s vision of the American
farmland, and its special accents and rhythms.
Andrew Buck, born in
He has shown widely and
garnered several awards, among them, in 1995, the highly competitive
Connecticut Commission on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship. Andrew Buck
has also curated photography exhibitions on the theme
of