In early August, the last of my resurrection lilies burst forth, their pale pink splendor blooming only a few brief days before withering back into the earth. More than any summer before in the nine years spent at my home, I felt close to those lilies — they bloomed for me. Soon I’ll be uprooting, moving into a new home. A few bulbs will come with me, but next year, someone else will enjoy this backyard’s lineage of lilies.
I took plenty of photos of them through the years: one with my oldest dog, Doogie, as a young pup, nonchalantly hiking his leg against a stem; another with a bee alighted, busily prodding a stamen. Others were snapped to capture different phases of their magic — from bud to blossom. Each year, as if by clockwork, pastel beauties sprang up in a perfect line against the fence. Each time, an additional stalk would appear; offspring had even migrated several feet away to the porch’s edge. Without a green thumb, these “surprise lilies” — who’d done all the work on their own — were the closest I’ve ever come to having my own garden.
Many others, however, have much greener thumbs than I. Throughout history, humans have tilled the land, farming vegetables or growing flowers and fruits, to beautify spaces or for sustenance. And as documented by photographers — a process explored in the Dixon Gallery & Gardens’ current exhibition, In the Garden — have expanded their relationships with both nature and community. We transform mundane landscapes — drab lawns, barren fields, bleak rooftops — into swaths of living art, colorful, useful, and serene.
Much of the 150 photographic objects in the exhibition came from the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, one of the largest and oldest collections of photography in the world. The exhibition, assembled by George Eastman Museum associate curator Jamie Allen, was first shown there in 2015. Earlier this year, In the Garden was hosted by The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida, and the Dixon is its final stop.
As for the collection of images presented, Allen says, “I wanted to look at what photography tells us about our relationship to the land, particularly the cultivated landscape. I dove into [the George Eastman Museum] collection and was noticing various themes, like botanicals or landscapes or how people interacted with the land.”
While Allen dug for photographs that fit those themes, she found some gaps. “Some of the things that are on loan were things I noticed were not very well represented in our collection,” Allen says. “So, more contemporary photography, or in one case, Karl Blossfeldt, who is a very important photographer in the history of photography.”
Blossfeldt’s photographs (selections on view were taken in 1928 and 1929) showcase minute details of plants as seen through a microscope. Delphinium. Larkspur, for example shows part of a dried leaf enlarged six times, its veins pronounced and ends curled like grasping tendrils.
With photographs dating back to the late 1800s up through the 2010s, the exhibition is as much a lesson in the history of photography as it is a look at plants and our relationship to them, displaying a variety of photographic processes (chromatype, cyanotype, daguerreotype, autochrome, photogravure) and prints (inkjet, gelatin silver, platinum, tintype, salted paper). “Almost 200 years of photography,” Allen says, “[You see ] how it’s developed over those different eras, but it’s interesting how it almost stays the same, too.”
The same can be said of our collective fondness of nature and cultivated landscapes. Woman reading in garden, a 1912 inkjet transparency from a digital file of the original autochrome, shows just that: a woman in a white dress, seated at a garden table, reading against a backdrop of green vines and red flowers. More than 100 years later, our gardens are desirable places for such still moments as relaxing with a good book.
Autochrome images such as Woman reading in garden give us a look at one of the first color photographic processes. Patented in 1903 by the Lumière brothers and popularized by amateur photographers from 1907 to the early 1930s, the process uses a screen of dyed potato starch grains to create color — blue-violet, green, and orange-red.
Some modern photographs in the exhibition find photography used in purposely artful ways, such as shown in Ori Gersht’s Blow up: Untitled 07, a 2007 chromogenic development print. Gersht aimed to explore the dichotomy between violence and beauty. To do so, he treated botanical specimens with liquid nitrogen and rigged them with explosives, and with multiple cameras, captured the detonation at various angles. The resulting series of photographs, a confetti of petals and color, shows there can be beauty in destruction.
A series of prints, titled Allotments, shot by British photographer Andrew Buurman in 2009, shines a light on modern British communal gardens. While these “allotments” hit their peak in 1943, with 1.4 million plots of English land producing 10 percent of the nation’s food, these communal gardens, very much in decline today, still remain an important part of the country’s culture. With Allotments, Buurman sought to reveal the diversity of and social bonds built within these micro-communities, which hold weekly gatherings and host annual flower and vegetable shows.
Other photographs on view explore different cultures and eras — from farmers in sprawling fields or friends gathered in small garden clubs to victory gardens and the rationing of crops during wartime.
Among the curator’s favorite images— and among her longtime favorites from the history of photography in general — is Calla, 1929, by Imogen Cunningham. “She took interesting, artistic photographs of flowers that really moved her work from the era of photography that we call pictorialism to a new era that we call modernism,” says Allen. “Looking at these photographs that really changed her practice of working — they were important to include in this exhibition.”
Allen made delightful discoveries along the way as well, such as works by Sharon Core, loaned by the artist. “Her ability as a gardener is as important in those photographs as her ability as a photographer,” Allen says. “She’s recreating paintings through photography and looking at still life of botanicals, vases of flowers, through photography. It’s interesting to see how she’s speaking about the role of photography in regard to painting and art in a new and different way.”
While the exhibition as a whole asks us to view photography in a different way, it also transforms our ideas of what a garden can be and the odd places natural beauty can be found, if sometimes overlooked. This can be seen in images such as Brad Tempken’s photograph of a rooftop garden on Chicago’s City Hall or Brad Moore’s Trini Circle, an artful snapshot of a dead bush whose branches sprawl, bare, in front of a stone wall, but behind, the top of a billowing evergreen peeks over; the two connect, visually, to form a whole.
Dixon director Kevin Sharp’s favorite image in the show may be that of Claude Monet in his garden, taken by Nickolas Muray in 1926. “It was happenstance that Muray was able to get that shot,” says Sharp. “Because he’d written to Monet, and Monet didn’t respond. Muray came from the United States, so he goes out to Giverney on a lark, not knowing whether he’d find Monet there or not.”
He does, and interestingly, Sharp notes, “Muray shoots him, not in his studio surrounded by his paintings, but instead out in his garden. It gives an indication of how much Monet loved his gardens. And that may well be the last photograph ever made of Monet because he dies just a few weeks later.”
Sharp adds, “These days we are all photographers by virtue of the smart phones we carry around with us at all times … in this case, we’ve gone to one of the greatest photography collections in the world, the collections of the George Eastman Museum, and their holdings are extraordinary. Of course, a project on photography of gardens was a perfect match for a place like the Dixon, and hopefully our visitors are thinking the same thing.”
In the Garden runs through September 30th at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens.
