I’ve been taking pictures of gardens and city parks since I started using a camera as a child. These sorts of green spaces are often thought of as a little piece of nature, even though they are completely human constructions, created to serve a particular purpose. This notion was my starting point for creating a ‘portrait’ of a garden using the artificiality of flash photography and instant film. I was attracted to this particular garden because it is in many ways an “in-between” or liminal space: it is culture and nature; it is both arranged and unorganized; it is private and public, as it was tended by the ground floor tenant of the adjacent apartment building, but all of the tenants living in the building had access to it.
The photographs in this series were shot in autumn in Dusseldorf, Germany with a Polaroid 600 camera. They were digitally scanned and printed as 15x15cm prints in 2011. All of the images are untitled. City Garden was shown at the Gallery 44 Member’s Gallery, Toronto in October of 2011.