gardens and the web
Fred Hapgood
I've been thinking about the interaction of gardens and
the online medium, especially from the point of view of
communicating the garden experience.
This interaction raises several issues. Should a garden
photo destined for the web be shot differently from one
intended to be published on paper? Is some material
more appropriate than others? Suppose a person were
planning on presenting his garden on the web; are there
large-scale design considerations that follow from
that? Is there a concept out there of
cyberhorticulture?
One might even get really radical here and question
whether the technology doesn't undercut garden
photography as we know it. Typically pictures of
gardens are not representative views of how those
gardens look at an average time during an average day.
Anything but. Photographers show up at the 'best' time
of the 'best' day and shoot from the 'best' spot, where
'best' equals their fantasy of how the object 'should'
look.
There is something slightly offputting about all this
manipulation. Photographers would argue in response
that photographs are supposed to represent more than a
single random point in space-time; they are supposed to
be about essences and identities. Anything
representing deeper truths will by nature be a bit
false to average, everyday, local reality.
There's something to that; nonetheless, my sense of
unease lingers. I get a feeling for the problem by
scrolling through one of the many panoramic landscape
views online and finding a bit in it that might have
been picked by the photographer to 'represent' the
whole scene, had he or she been restricted to the usual
frame shot. (Often frame shots are used to make up the
'table of contents' of the panoramic resources, so you
don't need even to look to find it.)
Comparing these photographic experiences, I feel that
the experience of the ambient richness and complexity
delivered by panoramas is worth far more than the
'essences and identities' distilled out by
photographers.
You could argue that this disparity is far more obvious
online than it would be on paper, and that might be
right. Still, I come away with the feeling that
gardencams, scrollable panoramas, interactive path
navigation, time-lapse photography, and zooming
(selectable degrees of resolution) all make it possible
(in theory) to have a far richer 'presentation
relationship' with gardens than is possible with framed
stills (excepting for the work of the very most
talented photographers). To take a pragmatic
illustration, it seems likely to me that a garden
supply store showing how a large numbers of species
actually grow over long periods of time is going to
have a lot more credibility than a store trying to use
single stills of a single flower to sell the same seed.
If there is anything like a cyberhorticulture, picking
designs that show to best advantage online, that would
seem to mean building gardens that are rich, fluid,
unpredictable, and dense in changes over time and
space. Which sounds pretty close to the kinds of
gardens people like to plant anyway, which is good.
I also wonder whether there might not be some kind of
fruitful interplay someday between website design and
garden design, though so far this is just random
speculation.
Not so Good Gardener
Fred,
I am only too happy to send some photos of my garden at the end of summer
and when it has not been watered. Maybe this will add a touch of reality to
your life!
Regards,
Hapless