My photographs illuminate the shifting balance of power evident in gardens and conservatories. Our human attempts to "culture nature" take various forms from the zealous geometry of the garden at Versailles to the absurdity of a domed desert and jungle in Omaha. Closer inspection of these various forms of cultivation reveals a delicate equilibrium, collaboration, and sometimes a collision of culture and nature. I find evidence of tension between plants and human efforts to control them in gardens worldwide from the carefully clipped topiary of European gardens to the wood and rope structures used to shape and protect trees in Japan. This work incorporates tension both visually (as a design strategy) and conceptually (as a metaphor). The subject matter is plants, but the ideas can be extended beyond the garden. The photographs in Garden Views highlight the similarities and contrasts in cultivated and constructed landscapes throughout the world. Many formal gardens in the U.S. and their stylistic precedents in Europe and Asia exhibit strong design qualities including clipped shrubs, ordered paths and controlled views using natural materials to communicate a cultural message. As landscape theorist D.W. Meinig said, "Landscapes sustain us as creatures, but gardens display us as cultures." While these traditions grew out of a particular cultural context, their styles have been embraced by people in vastly different times and places. Indeed cold climate gardeners have cultivated tropical or desert plants under glass for hundreds of years. This practice of designing, domesticating and improving upon nature reveals simultaneously our distance from and longing for the natural. It is my intention that the images represent more than the beauty of these sites. The lush quality of the monochrome gelatin silver prints reveals the strong organizational characteristics of the gardens' design while nodding to traditions in both gardening and photography. Eschewing the distraction of color, my photographs reveal thestructure of gardens and their complex social, ecological, aesthetic and horticultural concepts and effects that often go unnoticed by the casual observer. My work frames these concerns and encourages viewers to consider their larger implications as well as the photographs' formal beauty.
Garden Views: The Culture of Nature
