In my garden
31 July 2024
31 July 2024
I was working on a text for the forthcoming exhibition Garden
Futures, and before I knew it, I found myself browsing The Photographer in the
Garden.
I took photos of the institute’s outdoor space in 2015, when the first edition of The New Garden was being laid out. They are not very good, basically because I was trying to make pictures that would work as pairs, and they didn’t. Or perhaps some did, but as a concept, it tanked. I made a lot more photos than I was asked to or could ever use, but they never quite succeed in properly documenting the process. Almost ten years after, they feel somewhat outdated, I’d like to think that I would do it differently today (but I dare to wonder). In any case, I figured they deserved a new edit.
Here is a Belgian film I saw a couple of weeks ago. Not about gardens, but about looking, and paying attention. It wasn’t the mosses, made up of thousands of individual little plants and flowers that got the message across, but the city of Brussels, its green outskirts, the warm summer night glow and long walks. A particular shot of an overgrown, broken fence. A building under construction with cranes slowly moving in a dusky sky. Imaginary photographs.
I took photos of the institute’s outdoor space in 2015, when the first edition of The New Garden was being laid out. They are not very good, basically because I was trying to make pictures that would work as pairs, and they didn’t. Or perhaps some did, but as a concept, it tanked. I made a lot more photos than I was asked to or could ever use, but they never quite succeed in properly documenting the process. Almost ten years after, they feel somewhat outdated, I’d like to think that I would do it differently today (but I dare to wonder). In any case, I figured they deserved a new edit.
Here is a Belgian film I saw a couple of weeks ago. Not about gardens, but about looking, and paying attention. It wasn’t the mosses, made up of thousands of individual little plants and flowers that got the message across, but the city of Brussels, its green outskirts, the warm summer night glow and long walks. A particular shot of an overgrown, broken fence. A building under construction with cranes slowly moving in a dusky sky. Imaginary photographs.
Back to my text.
Derek Jarman, filmmaker and gardener, is part of Garden Futures. I look up Howard Sooley’s photos of Prospect cottage, and find Dungeness on Street View. It makes me think of The Garden from 1991 and its soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner. I search for lyrics, play the soundtrack. A bit overwhelming, not the music, but the feeling. Jarman is my first published film review (Blue), is going to London on my own and see Jubilee in a movie theatre that used to be a railway station. Or a church, I can’t remember. Is a rattling projector in a cramped booth. Is driving to Poland in a dodgy car. I un-forget how I took stills of The Garden and other art films from playing VHS tapes. They are probably in a box of slides somewhere not far from where my feet are. I resist the urge to crawl under my desk.
I’m not a gardener, and I rarely photograph plants or flowers unless I’m asked to. I look at gardens as landscapes. Or architecture. Eyes on the horizon. This is the last photo I took of The New Garden in its original lay out, a year or so before it was razed to the ground.
Derek Jarman, filmmaker and gardener, is part of Garden Futures. I look up Howard Sooley’s photos of Prospect cottage, and find Dungeness on Street View. It makes me think of The Garden from 1991 and its soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner. I search for lyrics, play the soundtrack. A bit overwhelming, not the music, but the feeling. Jarman is my first published film review (Blue), is going to London on my own and see Jubilee in a movie theatre that used to be a railway station. Or a church, I can’t remember. Is a rattling projector in a cramped booth. Is driving to Poland in a dodgy car. I un-forget how I took stills of The Garden and other art films from playing VHS tapes. They are probably in a box of slides somewhere not far from where my feet are. I resist the urge to crawl under my desk.
I’m not a gardener, and I rarely photograph plants or flowers unless I’m asked to. I look at gardens as landscapes. Or architecture. Eyes on the horizon. This is the last photo I took of The New Garden in its original lay out, a year or so before it was razed to the ground.