Garden Etiquette

Garden Etiquette is concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda—focusing specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (Aus) and New England (USA) in the late 19th century. This project spans digital and analogue photography (including darkroom techniques such as silver, photogram, photogravure, salt, and Van Dyke brown printing), hand-crafted glass (hot cast and blown lenses), 3D modeling and rendering (LiDAR and photogrammetry scanning), and research and engagement with State collections of nineteenth century landscape photography and settler environmental conservation documents. This project posits that a critical approach to photography—in practice, theory and metaphor—has helped locate my own relations to the constitutive violences that colonialism attempts to veil as “common,” “ordinary,” or “inevitable,” and asserts through aesthetic and environmentalist ideologies such as “civility” and “etiquette.”