About

Leland Buck is a Montana writer, landscape photographer, and printmaker working primarily in large-format film and intaglio printmaking processes. Based in Missoula and originally from the mountains of southern Colorado, Leland's work explores the convergence of natural forces and human histories across the American West. Through patient fieldwork in mountains and river systems, he captures scenes that reveal the continuity between past and present—depicting places in context of human and natural historical change. Leland prints his work using historical and alternative techniques including photogravure, salted paper, albumen, kallitype, and cyanotype, combining material experimentation with reverence for traditional craft. Seeking to expand his ability to render in print, he also explores traditional non-photographic printmaking practices including drypoint, hard ground, soft ground, aquatint, and sugarlift. He is comfortable interrogating the landscape of the American West through the image-making process, always trying to render the beauty and resilience of these changing environments alongside their underlying vulnerability, reflecting the timeless yet fragile spirit of the West.

Leland holds undergraduate degrees in History and Russian Languages and Literatures, and a Masters in Computer Science.

When he is not working on his own art projects, he is the founder and lead technology consultant at Indigitis Digital Media and the founder and publisher at Thorn Publishing

I am a photographer and printmaker based in Missoula, Montana. My work focuses on the landscapes of the American West, where the histories of land and people are deeply interwoven. Using large-format cameras and a range of historical, alternative, and mechanical printmaking techniques, I create images that explore the convergence of natural forces and human presence across the landscape.

My practice is rooted in observation and presence. I spend long hours in the field, patiently studying landforms shaped by hydrological and glacial forces, and watching how light and weather transform the land across moments in time. From the valleys once submerged by ancient Lake Missoula and the rivers of Western Montana to the mountain and deserts of the Southwest where I grew up, I seek out places where the stories of geology, climate, and human influence visibly collide.

Rather than condemning the marks of human activity, I work to reveal the complexity and continuity between past and present, nature and culture. I aim to highlight the subtle tensions, the harmonies, and the instabilities where human and natural histories meet. Underlying all my work is the acknowledgment that I am living and creating in a time when human activity increasingly defines — and imperils — the visual landscapes we inhabit.

Printmaking, for me, is a way to deepen the tactile, material engagement with the images I create. By combining traditional and experimental processes, I render photographs as unique physical objects — each piece a meditation on place, time, and the changing world around us. In an era of accelerating environmental loss, I strive to make work that bears witness, honors resilience, and invites a slower, more attentive way of seeing.

At its heart, my practice is an act of reverence — for the timeless beauty, the ruggedness, and the veiled vulnerability of the American West.