2023 using the Blurbdesigned on demand publishing serviceus. dished Paradise was to serve ur purpose has been changed: we are il: chisholm.m.i@gmail.com t https://mike-chisholm-photo.squarespace.com/ told whether the same has also : https://idiotic-hat.blogspot.com/ ppened to the purpose of Paradise.
anz Ka ka, Zürau Aphorisms, no. 84
I have had a long, losing struggle with the tidy-minded and the fixer-uppers. From 1984 to 2014 I worked in Southampton University Library, and the campus that I knew between the 1980s and the early 2000s was a rich mosaic of neglected corners. Of these the richest was the Valley Garden, a couple of acres of abandoned orchards, overgrown terraced beds (originally planted to demonstrate taxonomy to botany students), and wonderfully dilapidated glasshouses, with at its heart a secret pond where great knots of frogs gathered every February for a breeding frenzy. I loved exploring this Edenic, almost post-human spot at lunchtime, with its little stream that looded regularly a ter heavy rain, turning the valley bottom into a marsh. When my children were at the university day nursery I would take them exploring here, too, and we would gather apples from the orchard and check on the progress of the frogspawn in the pond. Most of the year, especially in winter, I had the place to myself. A ter a long morning enduring the boredom of meetings, I could escape into my private hortus conclusus, and document the regular small changes that would excite my eye, at first with film, then digitally: broken panes of glass scribbled over by snails, abandoned botanical experiments, the astonishing table-sized leaves of Gunnera manicata (the giant Brazilian rhubarb) that grow by the stream, the tell-tale traces le t by invasive nocturnal thrill-seekers... Every day was a fresh page. Eventually, however, someone in the university administration noticed this "wasted" space, and decided to re-develop it into a hazard-free leisure resource for sta f and students. The Gates of Eden were chained shut and, lamenting, I was expelled into the world. For a time, as a substitute I took to photographing the allotments that occupied another corner, squeezed between the ever-expanding campus and the real world. Frustratingly, though, I could never enter this alternative Eden, but only gaze down into it over the railings each morning as I parked my car. Then the university noticed and bought those allotments, too, in anticipation of some new enterprise, probably a car park, and ejected the vegetable growers with their wonderful season-by-season improvisations constructed out of casto fs, polythene sheet, and barrier netting. In the intervening years, I somehow kept forgetting about these garden images, as I concentrated on newer, more purposeful photographic and digital-imaging projects. Recently, though, I revisited them – several thousand digital images taken between 2000 and 2014, ranging in size from 1.3 MP to 16 MP – and it was like finding the key to a locked drawer and seeing within, almost as if for the first time, some wonderful things. Finally freed from the constraints of the medium-format film cameras I had previously been using – whether the mere twelve or fi teen shots per roll of film, the technical limitations of those bulky cameras, or the expense and e fort of having the film developed and printed every week – I think a fresh spirit of liberation found its way into the pictures I was making then, not unlike the feeling that has accompanied my recent move towards iPhone photography. Mike Chisholm 2023
Eden; and there he put the man whom he d formed. nesis 2:8
The Glasshouses
elding seed a ter his kind, and the tree elding fruit, whose seed was in itself, a ter s kind: and God saw that it was good. nesis 1:12
Gunnera Manicata
e garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. nesis 2:15
Gardeners at Work
ast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded ee that thou shouldest not eat? nesis 3:11
thou return unto the ground; for out of it st thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto st shalt thou return. nesis 3:19
The Allotments