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By Patricia Rosoff
Hartford Advocate
A great test of viewpoint is to set a number
of artists in front of the same object and see what they come up with. Even in
photography--that medium of utmost objectivity in most people's book--there can
be salient differences in style in the treatment of the same old thing.
Such is the case when three photographers
take on tobacco fields in Connecticut Tobacco Fields: Three Views at
For Buck, the spectacle of screens of gauze,
plants, sky and landscape is an essentially geometric exercise. He presents a
great, austere, and wonderfully erudite display of geometric planes. Within the
strictures of the frame, he offers dramas of quiet texture, of transparency,
translucency and the dusty opaque, which settle themselves like utterly spare
layers of stage curtains. Each fronting drape stands full-on, filling the
proscenium, echoing its staunch rectilinear regularity and permitting only the
merest suggestion of what might be going on behind.
In surreptitious leaks, a bit of grass might
interrupt the apron of dirt at our feet, or poke a leafy "hand" from
behind the edges of the scrim. The echelons of plants are alive behind the
screen, their shadowy presence casting a restlessness
upon the blankness of the view. The photographer stands outside the view,
taking its measure, ordering it to stand still, to make sense. Buck is an
artist playing with the Western history of art that demands simplicity,
clarity, harmony, and order.
It is this essential tension that gives
Buck's work its life: a stern Puritan struggle to cast regularity over nature,
to make geometry visible. And to celebrate its measured music
without the frilly distractions of riotous organic proliferation.
For
Alongside the others, Sceery's
views break like a thunderstorm, her views wide open, sweeping, baroque. There is no enclosure here, and no restraint, just
huge, bracing, light-pregnant drama. In these pictures, the tobacco net is no
wall, no screen, no barrier. Rather, it is a joyous
player in a drama of light and atmosphere. Against the velvety darkness of her
landscape, these great fat ropes animate the phrase "fiber optic
cable"--their very strands seem lit from within.
Rather than draped and enclosing, her netting
is rolled up and windblown--dramatic sweeps of bunting looping sideways in the
currents, parallel to the ground, running before the wind in concert with
turbulent fields of clouds being shunted by those same winds above. This is
cosmic stuff, putting us not on the Earth but in the very currents of a dynamic
universe.
Certainly this is about more than just
tobacco!