Contemporary Views

Through the camera's eye, we see the ordinary in extraordinary ways

YOU'LL NEVER look at your own garden, or anyone else's, quite the same after taking in the new garden photography show at the Tacoma Art Museum. Starting Saturday and continuing through April, "Contemporary Photography and the Garden: Deceits and Fantasies" takes moody garden shots to a whole new level.

Don't expect pretty, charming, sweet or familiar. These 16 European and American photographers see the garden as metaphor and symbol, majesty and mystery. How can photos be so tactile, have so much depth and resonance? Just the show catalog seems to exude atmospheric intrigue. The exhibit can be enjoyed as garden history, photographic wizardry, landscape artistry or simply as celebration of nature in guises from comforting to disturbing.

Organized by the American Federation of Arts, the traveling exhibit brings the work of some of the world's leading modern photographers to Tacoma. "What is fascinating to me," says Rock Hushka, curator of contemporary and Northwest art, "is that the photographers approach this the same way as gardeners, looking at volumes, colors, shapes, composition — the photos show the resonance between the two art forms."

Some shots, such as Sally Apfelbaum's work featuring Monet's garden at Giverny, seem vaguely recognizable. Here are the ponds, paths and flowers in Monet's paintings. In photos ranging from 2 feet to mural-sized, multiple exposures fracture the scene into overlapping textures. The repetition of forms and colors evokes Monet's own watery reflections, but with a Cubist edge, as if the Impressionist collaborated with Braque or Picasso, all interpreted by a 21st-century photographer.

Other photos feature specific gardens, whether planted in the ground or composed in the photographer's own studio. French photographer Daniel Boudinet explores the concept of boundaries in his shots of sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden. Where does the garden end and the Scottish countryside begin?

Gregory Crewdson constructs "gardens" of fake organic elements in his studio. Why does a pile of bright butterflies seem so sinister? You'll be warmed by Sally Gall's silver-gelatin images of the striking light and sumptuous plant silhouettes in Hawaiian and Brazilian gardens. The exhibit's variety of garden forms is stunning, from decaying ruins to crisply pleached apple branches, from iconic trees and raked sand to Lynn Geesaman's dark and massive hedges.

Some of the photos, interesting as they are, seem as if the photographer was just playing around with distortion to give us a different view of space, light and plants. Many more show that the distortion of the camera lens results in amplification and insight. Why do blown-up, blurry Allium giganteum look more like themselves than the actual plants? Some of these photographers seem able to use the camera as an essence detector.

Photos by Sally Mann and Catherine Opie were commissioned especially for this show. Opie's work transposes images as disparate as Santa Barbara estates and a prison yard in Minneapolis; are they trite, are they beautiful, are they gardens? Sally Mann photographed the Mexican jungle garden of English poet/architect Edward James. These black-and-white photos are haunting evocations of a cultivated garden reclaimed by the wild.

While photographers and artists will be impressed by the exhibit's style and technical punch, gardeners will come away reinforced in the knowledge that the artistry lies in nature itself. However manipulated, simulated, filtered, objectified and made metaphor of, nature's glory and life force shine through in every one of these fascinating photos — well, maybe not the silicone-coated grass or the pile of synthetic butterflies . . . but in all the others.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.