Picturing Eden

Today’s hottest photographers featured in this contemporary exhibition

“A striking visual display … many knockout images.”
- ArtNews magazine (Summer 2006 issue)

You have only two more weeks to experience George Eastman House’s contemporary photography exhibition Picturing Eden, which closes Sept. 4.

Come see why ArtNews called it a “compelling exhibition” and see why Picturing Eden, which tours internationally after its Rochester debut, is described in the current issue of Oprah Magazine as "vivid" and "daring."

The exhibition features more than 130 photographs by 37 international artists. Picturing Eden’s bold color images invite you to envision Eden and paradise, as captured and interpreted by today's most admired contemporary artists such as Mike and Doug Starn, Adam Fuss, Ruud van Empel, Sally Mann, Jo Whaley, Alec Soth, and Lori Nix.

Here's what some of the visitors to the Picturing Eden exhibition have recorded in the gallery comment book:

"Breathtaking!"

"Eden was probably never so beautiful as man's interesting conceptualizations of it."

"I am amazed by what an artist can see in the every day!"

"Amazing show - thoughtful variety. Thanks GEH."

The artists featured in Picturing Eden examine the many facets of paradise, from a place of contemplation and restoration to a site of loneliness and despair. The exhibition is organized in four sections: Paradise Lost, Paradise Reconstructed, Despairing of Paradise, and Paradise Anew. The photographs explore the development and changing styles of the garden and concepts of paradise. By looking at the notion of paradise and the garden through the photographic lens, Picturing Eden highlights original lost innocence, the ongoing significance of a humanistic, culturally charged environment, and its place in the history of art. Eden or paradise, a place of great or perfect happiness and satisfaction, is an ideal still sought today.

"As a mythic theme, Eden resonates across time and cultures, and is charged with both political and environmental concerns," explained guest curator Deborah Klochko, a Rochester native and the director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. "Many of these photographs deal with the idea of the garden as a metaphor for good and evil, heaven and hell. Picturing Eden focuses on the state of humankind after Eden - paradise is no longer available to us, but from that moment on we have attempted to regain it."

An accompanying catalog, published by Steidl, will feature photographs from the exhibition; an introduction by Dr. Anthony Bannon, director of George Eastman House; an essay by Klochko; and a transcribed conversation about paradise and the visual image. The conversation participants are Merry Foresta, director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative; Louise Mozingo, associate professor, Department of Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley; and award-winning author Rebecca Solnit.

"Gardens engage the large values of rhetoric and science. Their terms of engagement summon idealized compositions of unity, balance, and sequence," wrote Dr. Bannon in the catalog introduction. "Gardens are equally vain and self-centered. Shaped by the bold will of their makers, they take on the romance of humankind‘s desires for dominance. In the name of free expression, gardens share the arrogance of other arts, and their tropes – the tectonics of sculpture and architecture, the chronology of storytelling, the harmonies of music and poetry, even the memories of photography."

The Picturing Eden artists are:
Greta Anderson, Wayne Barrar, Jayne Hinds Bidaut, Binh Danh, Susan Derges, Ed Dimsdale Ruud van Empel, Adam Fuss, Sally Gall, Lyle Gomes, Gavin Hipkins, Matthias Hoch, Simen Johan, Izima Kaoru, Michael Kenna, Mark Kessell, Sally Mann, Lori Nix, Han Nguyen, Michael Parekowhai, John Pfahl, J. John Priola, Michael Rauner, Liz Rideal, David Robinson, Josephine Scabo, Vincent Serbin, Jiri Sigut, Camille Solyagua, Alec Soth, Mike and Doug Starn, Hongbin Sun, Maggie Taylor, JoAnn Verburg, Terri Weifenbach, Jo Whaley, Masao Yamamoto.

Picturing Eden has been organized by George Eastman House and will tour internationally. The exhibition is supported by the Comer Foundation, Mondriaan Stichting Foundation, and Creative New Zealand.

For more information about the exhibition or lectures, please call (585) 271-3361 ext. 218. Admission to George Eastman House is $8 for adults; $6 for senior citizens (60 and older); $5 for students; $3 for children (5 to 12); and free for children 4 and under and museum members.