Lindsay Buchman: Earth Sky Plant Ground

Earth Sky Plant Ground is an artist book by Lindsay Buchman featuring analog and digital landscape photography and writing from Orange County, CA. The book is composed predominantly of cinematic framing from medium-format photographs, contrasted with video stills, and contextualized by a trifold essay. Buchman's images respond to the specificity of her childhood home, wrapt in Southern Californian light, time bent backward through a roving lens, and notations on the texture of the landscape: agricultural land tilled into plateaus for "master-planned communities," the fading scent of eucalyptus enveloped by commercial real estate, the bough of a 38-year-old navel citrus tree. Her work reflects on a poetics of suburbia, articulated through the contradictions of Orange County's historic reputation as a conservative stronghold with racist underpinnings. From this ground, Buchman asserts that the suburbs are more complex than a litany of franchised strip malls; rather, they are a place where the marginalized find their voice. In the absence of her cultural heritage, she turns to her familial backyard as a type of refuge from the world outside and the inscrutability of her biological family tree. Instead, the dirt becomes a map, home becomes circular, transformed into something boundless. Her photographs replace groundlessness with the feeling of light and the smell of young citrus leaves — subtle gestures that reflect on the affect that exists beyond language.

Published by Seaton Street Press
Softcover
10 x 6.5 in.
52 pages