Land
E scape
Thomas S. Ladd
The garden became political, not a place for romantic musing on nature; it was now about nature and culture. I will continue to make photographs there for years to come. There are so many variables and constants that they are often hard to grasp. Another interesting series of yours that has particulary impressed me and on which I would like to spend some words is Los Paramos. This works is capable of establishing such an atmosphere of memories, using just little reminders of human existance... I would like to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
That is an interesting question. Los Páramos, believe it or not, grew out of the photographs made at the Sheep Pasture. As I made images at the community garden, I noticed that many of the vegetables were left to rot. They were not grown for food, but as a therapeutic hobby. I found a great deal of waste, and I began to think, “Where doesn't this happen? Where does it count? Where is the environment valuable, threatened, precarious?” I researched poverty, agriculture, and environmental destruction. It led me to mountain farms in the Northern Andes. I found a guide and traveled to Ecuador, where I photographed kitchen gardens, so completely different from those in Easton, Massachusetts. They were small gardens in the cloud forest cultivated by people who truly needed the food that they harvested from those gardens. While I was there, I visited the páramo, a beautiful cold, windswept landscape between the tree and snow lines of the northern Andean Mountains. It was sublime. I knew I had to do a body of work based upon what I saw there. It was out of the EXPERIENCE IN the landscape that I found the sublime and beautiful. The concrete and the real created an atmosphere that pointed towards less tangible things—to spirituality, to the mysterious. My body grew tired and my hands got dirty as I hiked into that sublime landscape. Mountains can be spiritual places, but you can't get
From Los Páramos (Ozogoche, Ecuador)
to remote places praying on your knees in a church. I found a great deal of healing energy there. Yet, the páramo is a real place, with real problems, and is not protected simply because of the way it makes some of us feel. It is threatened, it is political, it is a frontier for agriculture, and IT IS NOT A BUCOLIC PLACE. And, yet it is. It is where poverty and the environment clash. It is sublime; it is real. It is a terrain that is being neglected and exploited by both