The Garden

One of the batch of books I've been trailing lately is – finally, after several false starts over a number of years – a pulling-together of the photographs I took while I was still employed at the University of Southampton Library and visiting the Valley Garden on the Highfield campus on a more or less daily basis.

It took quite a while to select and edit a book-length sequence, which is not unusual, especially when confronted with several thousand fairly similar photographs; but I then decided to take an extra step, and invited people of varying levels of sophistication where photo-books are concerned to review my first draft. This is something I hadn't tried before, but I thought it might prove worthwhile, as it is very easy to stop being able to "see" your own over-familiar photographs and, worse, to imagine they possess qualities and connections which are nothing but projection and wishful thinking.

It was an interesting exercise, but in the end (as I suppose was inevitable) the feedback was too contradictory and confusing to be useful: do this / don't do that, heighten that / de-emphasise this, and so on. So I decided to stick with that first draft after all, as everything I wanted to show is in there somewhere – to paraphrase Eric Morecambe, it contains all the right photographs, but not necessarily in the right order – and, more to the point, any new revision would require me to buy yet another copy of the book if I wanted to keep it in my Blurb bookstore. It was a clear case of diminishing returns, throwing good money after bad, and the best being the enemy of the good (to mention just a few "wise saws and modern instances" that come to mind): hardly anyone will buy the thing, however much time I might spend "improving" it.

Here is the introduction from the book (actually, another "magazine" of 76 pages):

I have had a long, losing struggle with the tidy-minded and the fixer-uppers. From 1984 to 2014 I worked in Southampton University Library, and the campus that I knew between the 1980s and the early 2000s was a rich mosaic of neglected corners. Of these the richest was the Valley Garden, a couple of acres of abandoned orchards, overgrown terraced beds (originally planted to demonstrate taxonomy to botany students), and wonderfully dilapidated glasshouses, with at its heart a secret pond where great knots of frogs gathered every February for a breeding frenzy. I loved exploring this Edenic, almost post-human spot at lunchtime, with its little stream that flooded regularly after heavy rain, turning the valley bottom into a marsh. When my children were at the university day nursery I would take them exploring here, too, and we would gather apples from the orchard and check on the progress of the frogspawn in the pond.

Most of the year, especially in winter, I had the place to myself. After a long morning enduring the boredom of meetings, I could escape into my private hortus conclusus, and document the regular small changes that would excite my eye, at first with film, then digitally: broken panes of glass scribbled over by snails, abandoned botanical experiments, the astonishing table-sized leaves of Gunnera manicata (the giant Brazilian rhubarb) that grow by the stream, the tell-tale traces left by invasive nocturnal thrill-seekers... Every day was a fresh page.

Eventually, however, someone in the university administration noticed this "wasted" space, and decided to re-develop it into a hazard-free leisure resource for staff and students. The Gates of Eden were chained shut and, lamenting, I was expelled into the world. For a time, as a substitute I took to photographing the allotments that occupied another corner, squeezed between the ever-expanding campus and the real world. Frustratingly, though, I could never enter this alternative Eden, but only gaze down into it over the railings each morning as I parked my car. Then the university noticed and bought those allotments, too, in anticipation of some new enterprise, probably a car park, and ejected the vegetable growers with their wonderful season-by-season improvisations constructed out of cast-offs, polythene sheet, and barrier netting.

In the intervening years, I somehow kept forgetting about these garden images, as I concentrated on newer, more purposeful photographic and digital-imaging projects. Recently, though, I revisited them – several thousand digital images taken between 2000 and 2014, ranging in size from 1.3 MP to 16 MP – and it was like finding the key to a locked drawer and seeing within, almost as if for the first time, some wonderful things. Finally freed from the constraints of the medium-format film cameras I had previously been using – whether the mere twelve or fifteen shots per roll of film, the technical limitations of those bulky cameras, or the expense and effort of having the film developed and printed every week – I think a fresh spirit of liberation found its way into the pictures I was making then, not unlike the feeling that has accompanied my recent move towards iPhone photography.

And here is the Blurb preview of the publication (be patient, it can be slow):

The Garden

It is now available in the usual way via my Blurb bookstore, both as a 76-page magazine at £18.50 and as a downloadable PDF at £4.99. (There is also a large 12" / 30cm square hardback which I made for my own purposes and won't be making available publicly, but if you fancy one that can be arranged – email me – but it will set you back £75...).  [1]

1. I also have sitting on my work-table a few copies of a 22-page 8-inch / 20cm square stapled booklet produced by MagCloud which contains just the images of the glass panes and interiors of the Valley Garden glasshouses (title: The Windows of Eden). This was something I made as an experimental "proof of concept" item, but will probably not be taking any further at this time. However, I would sell (and inscribe!) a copy directly to anyone interested for £12.50 plus P&P. Here is a link to a flip-book style presentation. I'm a fan of these cheaper publications such as the Blurb magazines and stapled ("saddle-stitched") booklets, and the actual print quality is pretty much on a par with the much more expensive hard-bound books.