Landscape architect and photographer Anne Spirn theorizes that “every landscape has both real and potential form – what is, what has been, and what will, what might be.”
http://www.annewhistonspirn.com/landscapearchitect/publications.html
The Eye Is a Door, an exhibit in progress.
The Eye Is a Door, the book and the exhibit, is about seeing as a way of knowing and photography as a way of thinking. To photograph mindfully is to open a door between what can be seen directly and what is hidden and can only be imagined.
Through photography, I discover what is there, visible and hidden. I want to understand why and how things come about and to imagine what they might become. The Eye Is a Door aims to open up a world for readers and viewers, to transform how they see the landscapes they live in and to invite them to use photography as a medium of discovery. I want to inspire others to see the extraordinary in the everyday, to pause and look deeply at the surface of things, and also beyond that surface to the stories landscapes tell, to the processes that shape human lives and communities, the earth, and the universe.
Landscapes speak to me. They are living and dynamic, not static, but full of dialogue and drama. I am drawn to photograph a landscape as one might photograph a person: to capture its distinctive spirit, to reveal its history, to show the contexts that shape it. There are no people in these photographs, but their traces and the stories they tell are everywhere: in the landforms they shape, the paths they make, the structures they build, the places they dwell.
The Language of Landscape
My eye is drawn to the stories landscapes tell and to the significant details of their narrative. While my book The Language of Landscape was published in 1998, I continue to search for places that illustrate the expressive power of landscape language.
Places engage, inspire, and challenge me: when the processes that shape the landscape are distinct; where people have shaped and arranged the landscape to express identity and idea, particularly of nature and the deep values of memory and worship; where the power of certain places has been acknowledged by cultures across centuries; where I can sense how processes shape the local landscape, but more than that, the earth and universe, as in the earth's shadow and the Pacific Ring of Fire. I search for places
Marnas and the Landscape of Skaane, Sweden
Imagine a fairy tale in the form of a garden. The story is full of allusion and allegory, of journeys and homecomings, of animals and plants who engage the gardener in dialogue. The fable begins with a young man's inheritance: a small, open field and tiny, half-timbered farmhouse. He plants 600 hawthorns to form seven garden rooms, each room a realm enclosed by living walls and open to the sky. In the largest space, he shapes a group of trees, first into eggs, then, as they grow, into ten-foot hens.
The author of this garden tale is Sven-Ingvar Andersson, the H. C. Andersen of landscape literature. In 1967, two years after planting the garden at Marnas, he wrote the classic "Letter from My Henyard" in which the young gardener dreams of himself as an old man: too weak to hold the shears and clamber up ladders, he sits beneath a grove of hawthorn. All that he shaped has disintegrated, but he is satisfied. Clipped hedges and hens transform into a grove of trees: a restoration of the natural order.
I have been photographing this garden and its landscape context since 1990, following its evolution up to Sven-Ingvar's death in 2007 and since. I goaded him into writing a book on the garden, which he finished the month before he died, by threatening to write a book about Marnas myself. Someday I will do that.
Nahant
On Nahant, down a narrow, mile-long causeway reaching out into Massachusetts Bay north of Boston, one is ever mindful of tides, weather, water, light. Offshore to the northeast is Egg Rock: landmark, lightcatcher. Here, earth's shadow rises in the twilight sky on a clear day. Nahant is a laboratory for studying the lights of day, in season and place.