Why do gardens attract so many photographers? Edwin Smith’s photograph of a garden provides a case in point:
There is a sense that a drama is being played out, the inexorable growth of wilderness overtaking the artefactual nod to civilisation. ‘Co-operating with the inevitable’ is how Olive Cook, Edwin Smith’s partner, described his photography1. Much the same can be said of gardening. Perhaps the inevitability of a garden’s eventual demise reminds us of our own mortality?
Gardens are complex places. They draw out social and historical facts, but they can also invite a journey of associations. If you are prone to something like the ‘metaphysical turn’ which befell the photographer Paul Strand in his final months in his own garden at Orgeval2, then you will already have regarded lawns, flower-beds and ornamental gardens in a certain way, exemplified perhaps by how statues gaze Atget-like across parks.
Such a realisation must have struck the likes of many garden photographers in their time, Paddy Summerfield, Siân Davey, Vanessa Winship, Jem Southam and others before them.
But what does it mean to say that gardens are complex places? David Cooper in ‘A Philosophy of Gardens’3 concludes that the Garden is an ‘epiphany of the relation between the sources of the world and us’.
Gardens point to the contingency of human existence. They are allowed to have a nature and must be given room to be within their nature if they are to occupy that narrow space between culture and wilderness. But they can only be left to a certain point before they cease to be a garden. Beyond this, they lose their garden way of being, becoming less intimate, too wild to comprehend and take in in one go.
Their success is based on some order but pretending to be like nature, if you will. Where this boundary is drawn is different in each case and changes with the seasons and the inclinations of the gardener.
In my own case, the cultured tumbled-down nature of my garden acts as a counterpoint to my neat, ordered life. I strive to place the boundary as if nature is winning back its own space, for example, a wall made to look as if it’s falling down. Keeping it at this point requires constant vigilance. If the wall was to actually fall down, which it does on occasion, then it will have gone beyond the boundary that I have mentally constructed for it.
For me the epiphany comes from the understanding derived from the play between the space which gardens tend toward and the place which I try to impose. This play is also between my own cultured self and my wild side, my own interpretation of ‘good manners’, and from reflecting on how such balancing acts are maintained.
As I grow older this balancing act is tending towards the wild side. I spend less time on how I look, and care little for how other people think of me (within reason). My garden as a place, as a refuge from space, is very much a mental phenomenon.
1 Edwin Smith was a traditionalist eschewing new camera technology (his favourite camera was mahogany and brass half-plate Ruby) and unusual framing positions. At a time when 35mm reportage photography held sway and architectural photography was experimenting with stylised wide angle viewpoints Smith remained anchored to a more naturalistic expression of images, preferring natural light and 'normal' vantage points.
This attitude was not born from a refusal to participate in photography's progression from 19th century sensibilities. Rather, if I am reading between the lines correctly, Smith was more interested in the purely visual, not some transcendental notion of the image.
The idea of 'co-operating with the inevitable', as he was fond of saying, sums it up well.
2 Joel Meyerowitz’s selection of Strand’s photographs (2012) – ‘The Garden at Orgeval’, Aperture Foundation
3 Cooper, D.E. (2006) ‘A Philosophy of Gardens’, Clarenden Press, Oxford.
I came upon your site just now. If I may say so myself, it is great in many ways. I wish I could write and take photos as well as you do.