Garden/archive: photographic relation and exchange

Garden/Archive: Photographic Relation and Exchange uses the Botanic Gardens of Adelaide as a primary site of research, situating a series of photographic exchanges both within and extending from the site. Setting up a relational exchange between the singular recording of the photograph and an accumulative condition of the garden in an ongoing temporality, the research proposes an experience of the garden-as-photograph. Central to this proposition is an experience of the garden defined on the basis of a viewer in their experience of the present. Where the garden remains and continues to receive an experience of the present as a non-reproducible and irreplaceable place, the photograph remains and continues to receive the garden as a reproducible and replaceable place. The exegesis frames a conceptual understanding of this relational exchange by establishing photography as a temporal site of repetition and the garden as a spatial and temporal repeatability. The photographic work of Garden/Archive, as it instructs a reception of the garden for the viewer, proposes to condition the perception, recording and resonating effect of the photograph in the continuing reception of the garden archive.