The notion of garden is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Offering as it does the promise of security and the predictability of order, it appears in one form or another as an ideal in almost all cultures and traditions.

Having small teeth, weak claws and speed insufficient to outrun even a moderately fast cow, the world for humans has always been a rather terrifying place. Closing off part of it, killing or kicking out all the dangerous bits and cultivating only those we perceive as useful and controllable has up to now, always seemed like a pretty good idea. And in a pre-industrial world, when there were a lot fewer of us and we were spread a little more thinly, it could credibly be argued that such behaviours made sense. Now though, with the so-called "natural" world having effectively ceased to exist, the case is far harder to make, even though we continue to pretend otherwise by designating so-called "protected" areas as "parks", "wilderness" or "nature preserves". The inescapable irony is that that from which gardens were originally intended to protect us, must now be protected from us.

Photographers love gardens. Like sculptors, they share with gardeners the same subtractive process of making art and as any tourist knows, framing a scene through a viewfinder provides much the same sense of security as sitting in one's own back yard. And, it must be said, it's also much easier to make nice pictures in a garden than in the middle of a forest. After all, somebody else has already brought together a lot of the neat stuff, and framed it. Little wonder then that garden photography enjoys a long tradition. In the early part of the twentieth century, the great French photographer Atget turned his lens upon Versailles. More recently, in the 1970's Taki Bluesinger and Glenn Lewis set out from Canada to photograph ornamental gardens around the world. In the 1980's, Toronto photographer Geoffrey James made images of Italian Renaissance gardens and in the 1990's, the great urban parks of Frederick Law Olmsted. Most recently, Vancouverite Scott McFarland has been photographing the lush greenery of the upscale, private gardens of his hometown.

While acknowledging this tradition, I believe the work in this exhibit departs from it in crucial ways. The "garden" I photograph is essentially unbounded even though containing bounded elements. It is ungoverned by any over-arching plan. My choice of technique - the use of extremely long, narrow, composite images that encompass the full periphery of the horizon - effectively subverts traditional notions of pictorial order. This is further emphasized by the fact that the individual elements comprising each image can be re-ordered in any of four, different, although equally legitimate, configurations. Thus while what I show here is clearly an abstraction, through its de-emphasis of the pictorial, hopefully it is one that re-orientates the viewer toward a consideration of the content more than the form.

2 of the 4 different configurations of the same 4 elements

Richard Holden
November 2006