Lynn Geesaman: Gardenscapes
*Starred Review* Geesaman'sPoetics of Place(1999) contains some of the finest formal-garden photography ever published--in monochrome, no less, which she developed into vibrant, velvety visions of the ideal garden. She carries over the elements of composition and development that made those images so astonishing intoGardenscapes, but now she is shooting in color, and that has, she says, brought a crucial element of discovery into her work. She experiments with degrees of coloration in the darkroom, striving to find hues obscured by the predominant color (usually, in these pictures, green) that will help the print achieve "a painterly quality because all the color relationships are right." Mission accomplished in these ravishing pictures, which by turns call to mind Friedrich, Monet, Sargent, and, many times, Redon and Pollock. That is, their artistic manners range from mysticism to abstract expressionism. If in general they recall gauzy early-twentieth-century pictorialist photography, they lack its sentimentality by eschewing human figures, other than sculpture, and appealing thereby to the taste for austerity. But their austerity is, because of all the flowers, leaves, bark, and branches, the sensuous austerity that is one kind of timeless beauty.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved