Dog Days 4- Garden

Gardening is an often used and accurate metaphor to describe the act of making pictures. You toil, scratch and dig all the while wrestling with awkward tools, bad weather and grouchy neighbors. On occasion, your hard work is rewarded with something worth while and appealing. More often the photographer has little more to show for their labors than a few scratches and a large clutch of well earned weeds.

As a subject, the garden has also been an obvious, but risky attraction. Risky because the odds of coming away with little else but weightless, pretty pictures of pretty plants is great. But, much like a true gardener, a photographer will occasionally step in shit.



Mitch Epstein, Amos Coal Power Plant, from American Power, 2004



Lary Fink, Praying Mantis



Larry Sultan, from Pictures From Home, 1992



Joel Sternfeld, A Blind Man In His Garden, Homer Alaska, from American Prospects, July 1984



Lee Friedlander, from Flowers and Trees, 1981



Stephen Shore, from Uncommon Places, 1982



William Eggleston, from William Eggleston's Guide, 1976



Walker Evans, Flower Cart, New York City, 1929



Eugene Atget, Parc de Sceaux



Eugene Atget, Ragpickers Hut, 1910



Eugene Atget, rue Maitre-Albert, 1912



Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Hay Cameron In His Garden, 1865



Mark Anthony, Wild Flowers, 1857