Sunrise on Abandoned Greenhouses
September 30, 2012
Yesterday morning I drove to another greenhouse complex a few miles from the one I photographed September 2. My friend Britt and I photographed these greenhouses several years ago, before they were as overgrown as they are now. I was hoping to catch the sunrise through the buildings, but when I arrived, I could see that that wouldn’t be possible: far too much vegetation was in the way. What I could get, however, was the sun and sky reflected in small portions of the exposed glass, and that was enough for me. I was thoroughly enjoying myself, even as the sun continued to rise, when my camera battery conked out. Worse still, I had forgotten to put my second battery in my backpack. I am resolved to return as soon as possible, this time with two fully charged batteries, green Wellies, and tripod. . . . Britt and I aren’t the only ones enchanted by these greenhouses. Shortly after Britt and I made our second foray out to them, we attended a photography show where we discovered the work of Pipo Nguyen-duy, an award-winning art professor at Oberlin College. Nguyen-duy has produced more than 200 images in his series of the greenhouses, which he calls The Garden. Nguyen-duy’s photographic eye is wider than mine usually is. Where I see opportunities to capture detail, he takes in the whole space before him. Then he prints the photographs large, which gives the viewer a sensation of being there. His work is stunning, as you can even tell on his website. (Look at The Garden 1 and 2—two collections—and In Process, where you can scroll down to a section on The Garden.). Imagine these images as big as 30 by 40 inches, as I saw them, or 45 by 60, or even 75 by 100 inches. He calls his series “an inquiry into the Garden of Eden as an abandoned site,” according to his website. “As if from the perspective of a natural scientist or archeologist,” he writes on his Statements page, “I have become increasingly intrigued with the idea of the abandoned greenhouses as a future relic of a man-made Garden of Eden. Beyond serving as metaphorical landscape, I hope that my images from The Garden will also serve as a document of a vanishing part of Ohio’s unique history.” Read reviews of Nguyen-duy’s work (especially here and here) to learn more about how his photographs express his thinking about personal and universal themes. I’ll save the narrative of my own photographic vision for another time.
Romancing Reality 