Terza Natura
The botanist’s magnifying glass is youth recaptured. It gives him back the enlarging gaze of a child. With this in his hand, he returns to the garden where children see enlarged. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1994
This work stems from a long period of visual exploration of landscape photography. Questioning how to make images which reflect experiences felt in relation to our surroundings, and exploring where fear and pleasure overlap have been the goals of this project. It has also been important to recognize the constructed elements of our surroundings and our culturally inflected responses. Moving away from the landscape as a wilderness into the garden has enabled me to tackle these issues directly, and consider where our pleasures are based.
The garden and the landscape have a peculiar relationship with children in English culture. The garden is a place for play, for experimentation and discovery. It is approved by adults as a safe place, yet children can transform it into a place for monsters and demons, for adventures and hiding; everything is at once safe and a threat; the exact experience will depend upon the company of others and the disposition of the child. And gardens do not seem to lose their fascination for us once we reach adulthood either. As we approach our teens, they fall away in importance, only to reappear in middle age when remembrance of youth and pleasures spent in the garden become important again. We relive out fantasies and turn our appreciation towards the plants and skill of making these spaces. Children, however, do not require such specifics and it is the evocation of childhood that is important in these images. They are at once suffocating and intoxicating, pleasurable and repellent. We can see our childhood through them yet as adults we know that such pleasures are not so easily taken.
The English have been greatly influenced by many gardening styles, but it is the English garden which has the strongest relationship with the child and the photograph. The English garden, with its mixture of the natural and the constructed aims to disguise the construction and look natural, but also aspires to being art. Likewise, children are seen as being closer to nature and the process of growing up is an act of entering culture. And the photograph itself is a phenomenon which is formed naturally and spontaneously, but our interpretations and framings are subject to cultural influences and impulses. It is therefore possible to argue that there is a conceptual relationship between our ideas of childhood, the photograph and the garden.
The combination of nature and culture has long been recognized and Terza Natura refers to a 14th Century model of gardening which mixes nature and culture. Although this practice is inherent in many forms of gardening, Terza Natura is seen as a deliberate combination of both, rather than nature or culture alone. These images aim to provoke memories of playing in a garden, emphasizing the experiential, the immersive and the encompassing, while at the same time connecting with our more adult associations which deny us a lasting pleasure in our environment. The images are constructed so that the environment seems at beautiful, but the atmosphere feels as though it has thickened, becoming suffocating, and we have a desire to move away from them. The sense of being a child spinning on the spot, the blurring of the vision and the low view point are important visual devices in the work that reference childhood. As adults our pleasures in immersion can only be temporary, and the experiences soon lose their appeal.
The images are made with a pinhole camera, emphasizing the immediate and unmediated aspect of image formation. However, the construction of the images is clear through the use of the interruption of the visual field and blurring. The nature of the wide angle of view with an infinite depth of field also helps to provide the feeling of being in the environment rather than looking at it from a distanced (and therefore controlling) viewpoint. The images were made in the Oxford Botanic Garden, and although these images are not a documentary record of this space, this particular garden enables us to see with the enlarging gaze of the child.
NB For a full discussion of the connection between the child, the garden and the photograph, see Examining Nature and Childhood in the Garden Photograph, Unpublished MA Thesis, Julia Peck 2001. The idea of the photographic image being both nature and culture comes from Geoffrey Batchen’s Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, MIT Press, 1997.
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