Andrew Buck : Photographs

A N D R E W B U C K

Rockface

My work has always been concerned with the “human landscape” – that is, how our presence in and impact on the natural landscape creates an entirely new landscape not understandable in terms of either humankind or nature alone. These images are concerned with this process: all of the rockfaces I have photographed are cuts through hills, usually the result of blasting for road construction, or quarries.

A concern with abstract form has characterized my photography, even when working on straight forward documentary projects. This focus is evident in the present series, emphasized by pursuing form, pattern, structure, and even mood, in a seemingly chaotic aspect of the landscape. I usually have tried to eliminate any evidence of scale in order to highlight the emphasis on abstract form. However, in some photographs I have included elements that reveal even more than just scale, e.g. graffiti and drill lines.

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. In Ohio, the perimeter of the swamp is marked roughly by the cities of Sandusky, Fremont, Fostoria, Findlay, Defiance, and Toledo. It was so impenetrable that few attempts by anyone were made to even traverse it, let alone ‘develop’ it. 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 at least that distance from their subject.

While the argument can be made that many of these images are romantic, nostalgic, even melancholy, the fact remains that, despite what the rest of the country – and the world – is like, they were made now, that this is the way this area is now, and that much of the Midwest, and therefore much of the country, is like this now. And that, above all, is what that these photographs are ‘about’.

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As in most rural areas, family plays a big role in this area, and it does in these photographs. My wife's parents moved to Woodville in the early 1990s and now live 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.

It is nearly impossible not to be influenced by some people specifically and difficult not to be influenced by nearly everybody, positively or negatively, even if minimally. As a very young photographer, in the early 1970s, one of the photographers I was strongly affected by was Art Sinsabaugh. After living in Champaign-Urbana for a while and puzzling over how to photograph the area, he saw the spirit and heart of the Midwest landscape by reducing the field of vision to the thin strip of the horizon. Even though I had read his description of this many years before, it took just as long for me to come to this realization and for these images to be revealed, which seems right. A deep and seriously felt debt of both inspiration and gratitude is owed to his memory and work.

My intent in the series was not to copy his work, not to make new Sinsabaugh-esque images. Rather, after spending time in and photographing the area for a number of years, I realized that it was a subject that could only be captured and described accurately by using the technique of radically restricting the view, i.e. essentially eliminating the foreground and sky, thereby concentrating on what’s out there.

When I started this series, years after I first started photographing in the area, I expected to see how the country in general had changed since Sinsabaugh worked. Revisiting his work recently, it was very surprising to see how little has changed in 40 years. The most obvious changes are in suburban areas: the recent spread of so-called mcmansions and the vast shopping plazas that dwarf those of the 1950s and 1960s that we thought then were so big.

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

Photographs can strip objects of their meaning through abstraction of form. Usually, my efforts are to document places or objects. With the Tobacco series, my intention was also to abstract the structures as much as possible, 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.

The Farmington River

Natural Landscape. The phrase brings to mind images of woods and streams, mountains and fields of pristine and inspirational beauty, untouched by ‘the hand of man’. In almost any area of the eastern United States, and particularly southern New England, such a landscape is nonexistent. 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.

I photograph primarily in parks, yards or park-like places, places that we have in a way appropriated from nature and now consider or approach in a way we would a park. It might be presumed that this is because of these being the only places I am able to get to. While that does determine, to an extent, what I photograph, it is more the decision to shoot “J. B. Jackson landscapes“ (see the Statement page for an explanation) and their inherent accessibility. An example is the Farmington River series. The ‘natural beauty’, a relative and subjective term, in certain images belies their origin: “Rapids, Farmington” was taken from the location of outdoor dining tables at an upscale restaurant; “Collinsville Dam 1” is of a gap in a temporary plywood wall used to raise the river level for an annual boating regatta.

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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