Arts
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Exhibition Itinerary To Date
The Middlebury College Museum of Art
Middlebury, Vermont
January 20April 17, 2005
Parrish Art Museum
Southampton, New York
May 22July 17, 2005
Columbia Museum of Art
Columbia, South Carolina
October 21, 2005January 2, 2006
Tacoma Art Museum
Tacoma, Washington
January 14April 30, 2006
Please direct questions about
these materials to:
Suzanne Elder Burke
Director of Education
American Federation of Arts
212.988.7700 ext. 26
sburke@afaweb.org
Design/Production: BoxerDesign
Front Cover: Linda Hackett, Allium
Giganteum (detail), 1992 (p. 27)
Back Cover: Lynn Geesaman, Hedge,
Knightshayes Court, Devon, England,
1991 (p. 17)
About This Resource
Art can be a great source of inspiration for students. Contemporary art,
in particular, shows students how artists establish their own rules for
art-making, creating works that encourage people to see and understand
the world around them in different ways. The aim of this resource is to
facilitate the process of looking at and understanding contemporary pho-
tographs and to help teachers interpret the works in the exhibition. Teach-
ers may utilize these materials either in conjunction with a class visit to
the museum or independently. Suggested discussion questions focus on
a selection of works from the exhibition and offer ways of making them
more accessible to students. They are the rst step in engaging students
in looking at and analyzing art. Students should be encouraged to make
connections among various works of art; to establish links with topics and
concepts they are studying in school; and to give expression to their ideas
about the works of art in this resource and about contemporary photogra-
phy in general. The discussion questions in this resource are designed for
high school and university level students.
This resource was prepared by Suzanne Elder Burke, Assistant Educator,
AFA, with the assistance of Nelly Silagy Benedek, Director of Education, and
education interns Erin McNally and Patricia Tuori. The Exhibition Overview
and information on individual works of art are adapted from an essay writ-
ten by Thomas Padon, AFA Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs
and curator of the exhibition, in the exhibition catalogue Contemporary
Photography and the GardenDeceits and Fantasies (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, Incorporated, in association with the American Federation of Arts,
2004). The Discussion Questions, Glossary, and Select Bibliography were
prepared by Suzanne Elder Burke. The Web Resources were compiled by
Patricia Tuori. Michaelyn Mitchell, Director of Publications and Design,
edited the text and supervised design of the resource.
Exhibition Overview
5
Thematic Groupings
7
General Activities and Discussion Questions
9
Selected Works of Art from the Exhibition
with Discussion Questions
1 Jean Rault, Vue 17 du Potager du Roi, Versailles, 199397
12
2 Erica Lennard, Ginkagu-ji, 1989
14
3 Lynn Geesaman, Hedge, Knightshayes Court,

Devon, England, 1991
16
4 Geoffrey James, Villa Medici, Alley from the Pincio Wall

to the Courtyard Garden, 1984
18
5 Sally Gall, Rio Botanical Garden #3, 1986
20
6 Sally Mann, Untitled, 2001
22
7 Sally Apfelbaum, Air, 1989
24
8 Linda Hackett, Allium Giganteum, 1992
26
9 Daniel Boudinet, Jardin de Ian Hamilton Finlay,

Little Sparta, Stonypath, 1987
28
10 Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Projection 2 (Summer), 1997
30
11 Len Jenshel, Huntington Gardens, California, 1993
32
12 Jack Pierson, The Side of Tims Barn, 1995
34
13 Catherine Opie, Untitled, 2000
36
14 Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (butterflies and braids), 1994
38
15 Marc Quinn, Italian Landscape (8), 2000
40
Glossary
42
Bibliography
46
Web Resources
50
Notes
53

CONTE NTS 4
Sally Mann, Untitled, 2001.
Gelatin silver print, 40 � 50 inches.
Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery,
New York 5
Within the garden are deceits and fantasies; nothing is lasting. All is
subject to decay; dances and dancers alike will cease.




Roman de la Rose, thirteenth century
Gardens have been a compelling subject since the advent of photography
in the mid-nineteenth century. In the mid-1980s, however, an unusually
large number of artists began turning to the garden as a subject in pho-
tography. In their work, this generation of artists has explored variously
the human imprint on the landscape; the garden as an expression of mans
attempt to shape nature; the distinction of private versus public spaces;
and the degree to which gardens reveal the aspirations of the cultures that
created them. Ranging from depictions of gardens as tranquil havens, to
places of tension where exquisite beauty seems to coexist uneasily with
the inexorable forces of nature, these photographs reveal the artists explo-
ration of the gardens diverse sculptural forms, atmosphere, and rich sym-
bolism. A survey rather than a comprehensive examination, Contemporary
Photography and the Garden features the work of sixteen American and
European artists who demonstrate a wide range of responses to the physi-
cal and conceptual structure of the garden.

Gardens are extraordinary works of art in their own right. They share
a presumption of a heightened experience of nature, but ironically such an
experience is to be had in a setting of total artice, no matter how artfully
contrived. This irony is addressed by a number of artists in the exhibition.
Several artists subvert the idea of the garden as a bucolic symbol of nature;
their images play against the notion of a garden as an idyllic site for the
pursuit of pleasure. Working in locations around the world and in sites
that suggest the diversity of the typology, the artists go far beyond literal
description, giving visual form to the full range of physical and emotional
experiences a garden offers: the poetic possibilities, the lyrical beauty,
the sensory richness, the temporal element, the sense of wonder. These
remarkable photographs probe the relationship between man and nature,
art and artice, beauty and decay.

Gardens are intricately linked with the history of photography. Many
of the photographers who emerged in Europe and the United States begin-
ning around 1890, loosely grouped under the term Pictorialists, examined
gardens as part of their larger investigations of the landscape. After World
War I, photographers in pursuit of the modern dened a new sensibil-
ity. Instead of creating moody landscapes and painterly portraits, artists
embraced signs of modernity and urban life, leaving behind gardensrife
with soft, sentimental form and rooted in the past. Differences between
E XHIBITION OVE RVIE W 6
photography and painting were now asserted rather than sublimated. Art-
ists dispensed with the use of soft-focus and the pursuit of tonal delicacy
in search of a more direct, straight approach to photography. From the
end of the Pictorialist era, in fact, to the late 1970s, gardens were largely
ignored in photography as a subject of ongoing investigation. As the work
in this exhibition attests, gardens, once again, are providing artists with a
rich subject.

These artists see gardens as an apt symbol of the increasingly ambig-
uous relationship of man to nature, part of the growing environmental con-
cerns of the 1970s and 1980s. They mine the garden as a potent visual
representation of culturean imprint, at once beautiful and articial, that
reveals much about the time and the place it was made. Unlike many con-
temporary artists and critics uncomfortable with the very notion of beauty,
these artists embrace, indeed at times embellish, the sublimity they often
nd in their subject, while exploring the multivalent levels of meaning that
their visual investigations lend to gardens. 7
Below are themes that educators may use to approach the works of art
included in this resource.
THE ARTIFICIALITY OF THE GARDEN
Several of the artists in this exhibition focus on the articiality of gardens,
exposing the human impulse to shape nature to its will.
Jean Rault, Vue 17 du Potager du Roi, Versailles
Erica Lennard, Ginkagu-ji
Lynn Geesaman, Hedge, Knightshayes Court, Devon, England
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (butteries and braids)
Marc Quinn, Italian Landscape (8)
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Projection 2 (Summer)
THE ORDINARY
A number of artists capture the beauty of the garden but also seek evi-
dence of the ordinary within it. By focusing on mundane elements, the
artists deate the pretensions and seriousness of purpose some associate
with gardens. Perhaps not surprisingly then, these artists are not drawn to
grand, formal spaces.
Len Jenshel, Huntington Gardens, California
Catherine Opie, Untitled
Jack Pierson, The Side of Tims Barn
LIGHT AND SHADOW
Several of the artists in this exhibition capture distinctive conditions of
light and shadow within the garden.
Sally Gall, Rio Botanical Garden #3
Sally Apfelbaum, Air
Sally Mann, Untitled
Len Jenshel, Huntington Gardens, California
Linda Hackett, Allium Giganteum
Jean Rault, Vue 17 du Potager du Roi, Versailles
ATMOSPHERE
Each of the artists below portrays a strong sense of atmosphere or mood
in the garden.
Sally Mann, Untitled
Len Jenshel, Huntington Gardens, California
Sally Apfelbaum, Ai