Garden Views: the Culture of Nature

“Environment sustains as creatures, but landscape displays us as cultures.” — D.W. Meinig Human attempts to "culture nature" take various forms from the zealous geometry of the garden at Versailles to the cloud-pruning of trees and shrubs in traditional Japanese gardens. Closer inspection of these various forms of cultivation reveals a delicate equilibrium, collaboration, and occasionally a collision of culture and nature. The photographs in Garden Views highlight the similarities and contrasts in cultivated and constructed landscapes throughout the world. Many formal gardens in the U.S. and their stylistic precedents in Europe and Asia exhibit strong design qualities including clipped shrubs, ordered paths and controlled views using natural materials to communicate a cultural message. While these traditions grew out of a particular cultural context, their styles have been embraced by people in vastly different times and places. This practice of designing, domesticating and improving upon nature reveals simultaneously our distance from and longing for the natural, depending on the cultural lens from which it is viewed. The Garden Views series includes small editions of gelatin silver prints on 11x14 inch paper.