‘Trent Parke opens in Adelaide as Cash Buck closes’

Like his friend and fellow artist Trent Parke, Adelaide-based photographer Cash Buck is preoccupied with photographing the nuances of street life. Sadly his intriguing exhibition “blindspot” has just closed at the Hill Smith Gallery in Adelaide but I was lucky enough to visit the display with the artist, on the last day.

Stylistically Lear, 40, works in a distinctly square format, compared to Parke’s 6x7cm film format and presents his observations in tightly butted pairs – diptyches either similar in image content or blatantly incongruous.

Like Parke, Buck also sets the street back where it belongs – as a theatrical stage on which humans play and work. The atmosphere in his colour images is cool and graphic, with human presences subtly inferred, whether through pedestrians’ limbs barely emerging from the shadows – a single word “self” labelling a streamlined facade on a modernist building – or mannequins stacked in store window disarray.

Buck is an interesting, complex photographer and the coolness displayed in this exhibition was vividly contradicted by a catalogue he showed me of photographs made on self-assignment to Palestine in 2007. Here, Buck’s streets (and interior environments) were vividly rendered though the tragic, fractured prism of the Middle East. After looking through these colour images, Bucks’s photographs at the Hill Smith Gallery seem to take on a positively therapeutic, meditative nature – for both their author and this late arriving gallery visitor.