ABOUT

A garden is an enclosed space. A garden needs a frame if it is to be called a garden. The garden is the moment when a place becomes a landscape. The garden, or the orchard, is the germ of the settlement, the village, the town, the city and the nation. The garden, we might be inclined to say, is neither completely natural nor fully human and as such stands at an equal distance between Man and God. Humans are makers of gardens just as they are tellers of stories.

The photographs in Massao Mascaro's Jardin address both these aspects of culture. They embody the delicate tensions that occur in space and time; moments that are always suspended but never decisive, as though tiny doors opened onto eternity. His images may depict the space between two hands; a ray of light on a twisted branch; a twig caught in a wire fence; or the enigmatic look in a young woman's eyes.