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Scott McFarland photographs
highly designed gardens, showing us their mises
en scène. A garden’s first and foremost
condition is that it be seen, like the landscape in
general, as a painting. It is made visible, Anne Cauquelin
explains, by “its borders (the frame), its necessary
elements (the shapes of coloured objects), and its syntax
(its symmetrical and united elements).”1
McFarland’s photographs heighten this effect by
confining the landscaped frame within the photographic
frame. This effect of repetition echoes the presence
of observers in his gardens—analysts, inspectors,
or trappers—caught in their act of observation
by a photographer attentive to all these details. McFarland’s
images thus subtly shift our attention onto the micro-actions
that take place in an opulent garden, revealing the
precise and often unsuspected labour that goes into
its daily maintenance. He depicts this everyday activity
with an extreme concern for realism, capturing the minute
and seductive details of plants, flowers, and systematically
arranged flower beds. As Roland Barthes once again reminds
us, realism cannot be said to “copy,” but
to “pastiche”: it copies “a (painted)
copy of reality.”2 McFarland intervenes
in represented reality; inspired by painting methods,
he subtly enhances its bloom, making manifest the garden’s
artificial nature.
1. Anne Cauquelin, L’invention du paysage (Paris:
Plon, 1989), p. 17.
2. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 6. (Our
translations)
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