Capturing the garden

The garden has long been used by photographers as a place to study and develop techniques, assist scientific observation, reveal social attitudes or simply delight in the glory of nature

and often contained botanical specimens that could be used to test the light sensitivity of the chemistry.

The photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot’s first experiments with light-sensitive silver salts recorded the details of plant species. A botanist from a young age, Fox Talbot went on to develop the basic principles for most of the paper-based processes that were popular in the 19th and 20th centuries, in particular the concept of using one negative to make multiple positive prints. It was, however, his insistence that his images were not made by his own hand, but by ‘Nature’s hand’, that paved the way for the multitude of uses and understandings that have been applied to photography over its nearly 200-year history.

In his ‘Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art’, published as part of his illustrated book The Pencil of Nature (1844), Fox Talbot recalls his own failed attempts to make sketches using a camera lucida and camera obscura while on holiday in Italy, noting that drawing in a way required not only skill, but also patience for an amateur to make even a ‘mere

souvenir of the scene’. In contrast, photography had many possible uses: as a method of reproduction that was faster and easier than the printing processes of the time; as a means of cataloguing collections of objects both individually and en masse; as a technique for creating portraits and landscapes; as a way of recording discoveries made through a microscope; and as a method for documenting all of the details of nature, whether they be the branches of a tree, the veins of a leaf, or the structure of a dragonf ly wing – all without the need for an artist’s intervention.

Early photographs ref lected this myriad applications, many of which relied on existing artistic and scientific conventions, and the garden appeared across all of them. Other uses quickly followed, including portraiture – one of the most popular – which allowed people to obtain more detailed likenesses without the expense of a painted portrait or silhouette. Meanwhile, photographers turned their cameras to traditional

genres associated with painting, particularly landscape and still life, allowing for an expanded understanding of both mediums.

Photography increased visual literacy during the industrial age, as society embraced the reproducibility of images. In the last century, countless technological changes have made photography an integral part of both our culture and individual lives. Now with the prominence of digital photography, photographers often use the medium to re-establish our connection to the natural world in ways that ref lect this new, photographic reality.

• Excerpt from The Photographer in the Garden (Aperture, £40) with introduction by Jamie M Allen, associate curator at the George Eastman Museum, New York and picture commentaries by Sarah Anne McNear of the Aperture Foundation.

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Above Tina Barney’s 1982 portrait of the Goff family in their Rhode Island garden shows gardening as family pastime.

Left Established in 1949 the Upland Allotments in Birmingham, captured here by Andrew Buurman in 2004, are one of the UK’s largest allotment sites.

Above A solitary gardener in Northampton, Massachusetts, seems engrossed in his work in this portrait by Sheron Rupp, 2004.

Right In his composition au chapeau, ca. 1847, the French photographer Hippolyte Bayard has arranged the objects – a straw hat, terracotta pots, and water cans – with great care and familiarity. They’re clearly well used suggesting that Bayard might also have been a gardener.

Above Victory Gardens were first established in the USA to help the war effort during the First World War. In 1943 Ann Rosener made a series of photographs for the Office of War Information to publicise the scheme’s revival for a new war.

Left At Fraser Elementary School, near Charleston, South Carolina, the garden became a ‘classroom’ that both fed and educated the children of what was a struggling school on the verge of closure. This image by Lonnie Graham (2002) shows Harry Rosette, who worked on the project.