Human Flower Project

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Where Have All the People Gone? Garden Photography

Are garden photographers in denial or just taking a species vacation?

”Snapshot” entry: Hong Kong Flower Show 2007

Photo: YEUNG Wah-hing

Xris, the Flatbush Gardener, who makes roses and cicada shells tantalizing Sex in the City, alerted us recently to a trove of photographs all taken at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The visitors’ photo pool, with many of Xris’s own fine pictures, began a year ago and already includes over 1000 shots.  Now Xris has the delightful job of selecting a top photo for the month of June and has solicited suggestions. So we took a look.

From the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor’s Photo Pool

Photo: luluinnyc

Shazam! What a lot of glorious close-ups of blossoms, renderings of space, and highly textured images—mossy, airy, voluptuous. All that’s missing (all?) are the people. On the first page of images, only two of thirty shots are “human”—one of a scarecrow, another of Brooklyn’s rose gardener, who’s described as “beautiful” but nameless. On the next two pages, there were no people at all (even straw ones) out of sixty pictures. We kept hunting through the archive and eventually found a few human-flower pictures—of dancers and paraders at the Cherry Blossom Festival, several schoolkids, and a number of shutterbugs. Here are acres of flowers, but, turning Pete Seeger’s and Joe Hickerson’s good question on its head, “Where Have All the People Gone?”

One might say that since gardens—and photographs, too—are men’s, women’s and children’s creations, they embody a kind of humanism. It just takes a penetrating eye to see the human mind at work in a glorious perennial border or a well-framed foxglove. That’s surely so. But gardens are both by and FOR people, so why are do so few of the Brooklyn Garden’s visitors show us what people are doing there, how they interact with this glorious environment? The same holds true in most gardening magazines and websites. Among the many that feature fine photos of home, public and commercial gardens, one rarely sees a hand pruning or a vagrant snoozing. Why is this?

Many months ago we ran an intriguing essay by Earth Scholars James Wandersee and Renee Clary about plant blindness, the human tendency to screen out perceptions of the vegetative world, to see the people and animals instead of plants. Among garden photographers, might there be “human blindness” at work?

Perhaps people enjoy gardens as retreats from humanity. (In the inner city most of all, solitude is scarce.) Entering a botanical garden and looking through the viewfinder, maybe the last thing a photographer wants to encounter is another face. Some garden visitors may be seeking Adam’s exhilaration—a sense that this abundant place is theirs alone. We welcome ideas from gardeners, photographers, and everyone else on this topic.

2nd prize winning “Snapshot”

Hong Kong Flower Show 2007

Photo: CHEUNG Sau-mui

It’s also possible that “human blindness” is a feature of garden photography only in particular cultures. For example, the photo contest at this year’s Hong Kong Flower Show includes three divisions, “Flowers,” the people-heavy “Snapshots,” and celebrity cheesecake “Portraits of TVB Artistes and Miss Hong Kong.” Terrific! We’d like to add a “Who Done It?” category, too, for photos of the gardeners and designers. Don’t let these skilled and intriguing (and, often, very modest) people fade into the shubbery.

As Xris has issued his invitation, for suggestions on June’s best photo, we invite images of “humans in the garden” from Brooklyn and beyond.