For over five decades, Richard Buswell has trained his camera on the landscape of Montana, with its abandoned and overgrown homesteads, ghost towns and majestic never-ending skies. His black and white photographs frame cast-off, common things to reveal abstract patterns in the tradition of twentieth-century modernist photography. As Buswell puts it, his work is “more interpretive and abstract than it is documentary. The images explore the junction where decaying artifacts become visual echoes of the past.”
The places that Buswell visits often exhibit an understated natural beauty, but they are not scenes of majestic grandeur from places like the Yellowstone Valley. Instead, Buswell has documented the out-of-the-way Montana places in which new arrivals from America, Europe, and Asia hoped to find a better, more prosperous life.
Beautifully crafted, sometimes unnerving, and always thought-provoking, Buswell’s photographs showcase his love for Montana and the American West.
Photo Shot by John Reddy
“The images Richard Buswell records as he searches Montana’s overgrown homesteads, mines, mills, and settlements are not mere records of ruin, but painstaking efforts to capture the essence of transformation - lives become artifacts...[He] knows that stories are embedded within the artifacts of history, what he calls “the silent frontier.”
“In Buswell’s hands each object he photographs seems mysteriously pregnant with its own presence, charged with a pure and deep quality of recognition.”
“Richard Buswell explores the rhythm and contour of western life through the shapes and shades of everyday objects. His precisely composed photographs restore meaning and vitality to discarded decaying remnants of Montana’s material culture, reminding us of our mortality yet raising our spirits through the sheer beauty of his images.”