some japanese gardens

I just ran across this cool site, a pic­ture gallery page off of Bow­doin College’s Japan­ese gar­dens home page. Though my gar­den, with its patches of heav­ily assorted plant­i­ngs, gen­er­ally doesn’t have much of a Japan­ese gar­den feel, I have a real fond­ness for the stud­ied nat­ural sim­plic­ity of the Japan­ese gar­den aes­thetic. This site has some amaz­ing gar­dens, par­tic­u­larly around Kyoto, and includes the iconic Ryoan-ji raked sand gar­den, plus 28 oth­ers. Each has sev­eral pic­tures, a map, and intro­duc­tion and a brief bit of history.

One of the artists whose pho­tographs got me inter­ested in pho­tog­ra­phy again in the 1980s was David Hock­ney. I’m not sure of his level of infat­u­a­tion with Japan­ese gar­dens, but he did do this strik­ing piece in 1983, a big pho­to­col­lage of the dry gar­den at Ryoan-ji. It’s a lit­tle hard to see in this reduced pic­ture, but he’s pieced together bits of the gar­den, pieces of the sur­round­ing tem­ple, pil­grims to the site and the black plas­tic con­tain­ers of the film he was using to shoot the scene. And if you look close you can also see his socks.

When he was doing these pho­to­col­lages, the story goes that Hock­ney dropped off his film at the neigh­bor­hood quickie photo place. In this pho­to­col­lage you can see the mis­matched print­ing the place did, par­tic­u­larly obvi­ous in the cen­tral sand area. After Hock­ney made the orig­i­nals, these col­lages were then edi­tioned, using Hockney’s neg­a­tives. The peo­ple mak­ing the edi­tion tried to repli­cate Hockney’s orig­i­nals, which in this case meant going through the headaches of doing an inten­tion­ally “bad” job of print­ing the neg­a­tives, try­ing to match the job the local photo place did for Hockney.

These works don’t have the same vivid col­ors that Hockney’s paint­ings do, but they for sure share some of the same sense of space and time. Inspired by cubism, things don’t fit together per­fectly, but your mind pieces the scenes together in a sen­si­ble way any­way. For me these works are almost like sculp­ture in that regard: You can’t see them all at once. Instead of tra­vers­ing the space around an object, though, your eye moves around the image, giv­ing you a sense of space. View­ing the work–a col­lage of images cap­tured over a cer­tain timespan–engages time in a way a sin­gle pho­to­graph typ­i­cally doesn’t.

February 17 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design • photography | Tags: • • • • | No Comments »