Richard S. Buswell: Fifty Years of Photography by Richard S. Buswell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Richard S. Buswell: Fifty Years of Photography by Richard S. Buswell Dana Fritz Richard S. Buswell: Fifty Years of Photography. By Richard S. Buswell. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. 112 pp. Illustrations. $29.95 cloth. Richard S. Buswell: Fifty Years of Photography directs readers to look back at his oeuvre and at history. Throughout his Montana childhood and his career as a physician, Dr. Buswell cultivated a passion for photography at abandoned homesteads [End Page 360] and mining camps. The author’s preface includes accounts of these locations in vivid sensory detail. Seventy-two plates, printed in lush duotone, trace his black-and-white prints over five decades in chronological order, moving from more descriptive to more abstract. The earliest work, Railroad Trestle, 1976, depicts a crumbling roughhewn structure absent of rails which disappears into a forest. In Bedroom, 2002, the book’s cover image, an unglazed window framing tree branches is sandwiched between a peeling ceiling and a deep snowdrift. In some ways, this striking photograph is misleading as a cover because most of the plates in this book are from the past twenty years, when Buswell explored formal abstraction. While the author does not elaborate on the influence of Modernism, followers of photographic history will recognize in his work echoes of Group f/64, who formed in the early 1930s in San Francisco. They coalesced to evangelize about the ability of the large-format camera to convey a pure aesthetic that was free from the conventions of painting and narrative and was characterized by carefully composed abstract details of their subjects. These artists were criticized by some for turning their backs on social conditions of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl (the causes of many abandoned homesteads). The group dissolved quickly, but their legacy of formal abstraction and photographic technical precision endures. Most of the work in this book falls squarely into this camp, ironically eliminating the kinds of context and information Buswell details in his preface. While he is known as a Montana photographer and for photographing in homesteads and mining camps, most of these images appear “placeless” and the sometimes-unrecognizable subjects seem not specifically “Montanan.” Yet these details of plants, feathers, and bones are rigorously and elegantly composed as well as beautifully exposed. The work seems to hover in a timeless and formal past where the human and environmental injustices that propelled homesteading and mining in the West are peripheral to the pursuit of beauty in a decaying frontier. In many ways, the book ends where it started: with gelatin silver prints made in a darkroom, a photographic process and an approach that has become part of history over these five decades. Dana Fritz School of Art, Art History & Design University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln