Are garden photographs art?
by Charles Hawes (garden photographer) This was originally part of an invited contribution to a debate about the various merits of different garden media. And that the debate in full will be found in due course on a Gardens Illustrated podcast. Tim Richardson at Vista, April 2009 said that garden photographers are only interested in showing gardens at their best. Quite so. I do feel a compulsion to make the pictures I take as pleasing to the eye as possible. But I lay the blame for this idealisation of the garden at the foot of the publishers and ultimately at the nature of the industry in which both garden writers and photographers inhabit. And that is the entertainment industry. Our words and pictures are destined for the pages of magazines and books which are not interested in “the truth” about gardens. We all know that what editors believe that their readers want to be shown “lovely gardens” and to have an undemanding story accompanying the “inspirational” pictures which invariably
