It was above all the title that
attracted me to this tome: Garden State. For reasons
unbeknownst to me my mind associated it with Florida (quite wrongly,
this is the Sunshine State) and South Africa (because of the Garden
Route) yet since I wasn't too sure I googled it and learned that New
Jersey was called the Garden State. Well, Corinne Silva's book is not
about New Jersey but about gardens in Israel and in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories. Looking at her photographs (there aren't any
captions), I would have never guessed – as far as I'm concerned
they could have been taken in any Southern climate.
On the other hand, a photo book (not
always though) presents photos in a context. This is how Corinne
Silva introduces Garden State: „Gardens are micro-landscapes, and
gardening, like mapping, is a way of allocating territory. In Garden
State I consider the political
relationship between gardens and colonisation that has existed from
the eighteenth century to the present day. Over two years, from 2011,
I travelled across twenty-two Israeli settlements making photographs
of public and private gardens, in order to explore the ways in which
gardens and gardening may represent the Israeli State's ongoing
expansionist ambitions in the historic land of Palestine.“
Differently put,
she follows a specific agenda, she wants to show what is already on
her mind. And this begs the question: Does she succeed?
For more, see here
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