Through The Lens: Gardens And Photography

On Sunday afternoon, March 25, garden historian Leslie Rose Close wrapped up this year’s series of “Winter Garden Lectures” at the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack with an illustrated talk on “The History of Gardens and Photography.”

Ms. Close, an accomplished gardener herself, has found her calling in her efforts to preserve the history of landscape through her study of photographs. She has taught the history of landscape architecture at SUNY Purchase, and in 1980 founded a program in landscape history at Wave Hill in the Bronx. She also teaches at the New York Botanical Garden.

The landscapes of America and Europe have changed through the course of history. As cities grow and change, development spreads farther into the countryside and properties change hands; the landscapes in both private and public spaces change too.

A significant part of our history can be read in the photographs taken of gardens and parks over decades and the last century. Ms. Close’s mission is to study the photographic record of gardens in order to trace the history of landscape.

Her talk at Madoo was not, she explained, a history of landscape photography—that’s too big a topic for an hour-long talk. Instead, she offered a revealing survey of different types of landscape photography, from the earliest photographic images in the 1800s to the present day.

Interestingly, Ms. Close discovered in her research that women have been very involved in landscape history. Many of the most renowned landscape designers and gardeners—Gertrude Jekyll, Beatrix Farrand, Ellen Wilmott and Louise Beebe Wilder, to name just a few—were women. So were many authors of great garden books, as well as many of the greatest garden photographers. A lot of these women worked at one time or another on the East End.

Ms. Close began her talk at Madoo with a photograph from 1915 of one of the best-known properties in the Hamptons—Grey Gardens in East Hampton. Ruth Deane was the landscape architect and Mattie Hewitt—whom Ms. Close considers the best of all the landscape photographers—took the photographs.

During her talk, Ms. Close discussed how the advent of photography ignited a great debate about whether photographs of gardens, or any other subjects, could be considered true art. Many of the earliest images produced by cameras were of trees and plants. Up to that time, gardens were captured in paintings, which many people felt were truer renderings. The debate continues today.

For all their seeming realism, photographs can be deceiving, dependent on what the camera can capture and what the photographer chooses to depict, according to Ms. Close. The camera, she said, “is a liar and we all know that.”

The historian offered as evidence several picture postcards of the gardens at Villa d’Este in Italy, with their many fountains and cascades. She’d studied this remarkable garden from photos, she said, but when she visited the garden she was astonished to find that it was breathtakingly vertical, created on a sheer, towering drop traversed by switchback paths.

“Photography can easily omit something crucial,” she said. “There’s nothing like visiting a space.”

But can photographs be true art? What won the argument for Ms. Close was an 1866 photograph of two people on a rowboat in a pond full of waterlilies titled “Gathering Waterlilies.” The image looks like an impressionist painting in black and white.

During her talk, Ms. Close explored some ways photographers have sought to capture gardens with their cameras.

The earliest images were made by William Henry Fox Talbot, who coated writing paper with silver nitrate and made silhouettes of leaves and flowers by exposing the paper to sunlight, making the kind of images that children make today with treated paper sold in craft kits. Mr. Talbot called his process “the art of photogenic drawing.”

Close on his heels was Louis Daguerre, whose daguerreotypes were exhibited in the Crystal Palace during London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Ms. Close went on to show examples of the work of great European and American photographers, including Eugene Atget and Edward Steichen.

There are many ways to approach landscape photography. A photograph can express the mood of a landscape, document the plantings, reveal the effects of time, highlight intimate details, even capture a process of decay.

Of particular interest to the audience at Madoo were historical photographs of some of our most famous local gardens. One such of the gardens we were treated to was the Herbert estate (later known as “The Creeks”) in East Hampton, taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1917.

Landscape photography, noted Ms. Close, has always been rooted in historicism. There aren’t a lot of modernists. One notable exception is the present garden of George Soros in Southampton, a favorite project of the landscape architect A.E. Bye. A photograph of the Soros garden, designed for four-season interest, showed abstract patterns in the collections of snow in the hollows of dunes.

One major development in photographic realism that Ms. Close discussed was the advent of aerial photography, which enabled viewers to see landscape in an entirely new way. She described one intrepid woman who took her camera equipment aloft in a hot air balloon to photograph an aerial view of the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows in Queens, which revealed the landscaped layout of the great exhibition.

More recently, the commercial world has exerted its influence on landscape design, as corporations such as Pepsico have had landscapes created for their headquarters and used photographs of the landscapes to make statements about the companies. At theme parks, such as at Disney World, we can see extreme examples of landscape architecture.

Contemporary artists are taking the idea of landscape even further, Ms. Close said, showing a photo of a lawn made entirely of paper by the sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand, who was born in the 1960s. As he does with all his work, after photographing the “lawn,” the artist destroyed it; the photographic record—not the object itself—is the work.

She also mentioned Andy Goldsworthy, who creates pieces out of natural materials, then photographs them as they change over time. Another artist she discussed has been photographing gardens in cities such as Baghdad, which have been damaged by war.

More than just pretty pictures, all these photographs continue to add to the historical record of changing landscapes the world over.