Of Humans & Humus
Finding my place in Anne Immelé’s JARDINS DU RIESTHAL
As gardeners, human beings bring themselves down to the soil’s level and submit their seeds to the Earth in an act of prayer; there are no guaranteed outcomes in this offering. The very word human derives its etymology from the latin word humus meaning earth or ground. To work in the garden is to return to the truth of where we came from and to what we shall become again.
Photographer Anne Immelé’s Jardins du Riesthal transports us inside the garden walls and reveals the dynamic world of the humans therein. The book’s images lay bare the complex relationships between labor/rest, chaos/order, abundance/dearth, nature/culture, life/death, and individual/collective. It’s an expansive palette for such a small place. In fact, the garden is presented as a microcosmic sliver of the entire Earth. Rather than an imitation of life, Immelé’s art depicts the distilled essence of human life itself.
In gardening, the presumption is that the gardener is the source of agency within a natural system: the bringer of order. Any gardener will tell you the star-crossed impossibility of that role. We are, at best, one quiet voice speaking into the discordant winds of chaos, i.e. we’re set up to be defeated in our aims and be put into our “right” place. The community gardeners I witness in Jardins signal that the “right” place isn’t disempowered or rife with suffering, but fertile ground teeming with all the things that life contains.
The community garden is the optimal scale to experience and become conscious of the microcosm that the book encapsulates. An individual’s garden is more like a monastery or an abbey—too “zoomed in” to hold the complexity of our humanness, especially the messy parts. Zoom out too far and the garden is subsumed by abstract dynamics: the rural-urban divide, politics, and global economic phenomena. It’s not that these things aren’t at play inside the community garden boundaries, but they are tempered by the relationships therein. Here, there is nothing to obscure the relationship between the garden’s bounty and the loving labor that produced it.
The profound abundance of Jardins goes beyond the harvest of food. I’m particularly drawn to the experience of the pre-teens and young teenagers emphasized throughout the book. Like caterpillars turned pupae, they are visibly undergoing metamorphosis. Despite being so vulnerable as they cross the threshold between childhood and adolescence, they are unguarded within their garden habitat. The garden’s secret, intimate nooks and supportive old trees provide shelter, refuge, and a place to play, connect or simply be. In this way, Immelé shows us that the garden isn’t merely a backdrop for their metamorphosis but an almost supra-parental force of nurturance. I’m no stranger to the kind of human transformation that a garden can facilitate.
I became interested in growing food during college. The summer after my freshman year I started volunteering at a student-run organic vegetable garden where some of my friends worked. Getting my hands into living, moist soil was a precise antidote to the arid and stagnant academic realm. But it was more than a balancing out, it was a spiritual awakening that changed the course of my life and it is the reason I’m still farming today.
I was studying environmental science because, in my idealism, I wanted to help “save” the Earth from ecological collapse. By the end of my first year, I could see that my passion would have difficulty finding a home in the inherently dispassionate sciences. To be a scientist, one must emulate a non-entity in striving to be an objective observer. Rather than try and separate myself out from the object of my inquiry, at the student farm I was invited to incorporate myself as deeply as possible. I was part of the whole, in fact, an essential part without being the central element, like the spoke of a wheel. I knew that I needed to be a co-participant with nature, a process by which the separation between “I” and “nature” dissolved, thus revealing the truth. I had skin in the game.
Immele’s role in Jardins du Riesthal unearths a similar truth: that Immelé, the photographer, wasn’t just a passive observer (i.e. a disinterested non-entity), she was gardening in her own allotment. Once the shutter was actuated and the camera went back in the bag or around her back, her momentary status as a photographer ceased. She creates a division between observer and observed, but after a split second is reincorporated as part of the whole.
When the object of our inquiry is a microcosm of the macrocosmic whole, there is no wrong way to turn. There is a lifetime of exploration waiting in the area immediately surrounding us—even within us. We are in our "right" place.
Immelé speaks to great complexity, though her images are technically simple. She uses her 6x6 medium format cameras and natural light. There is movement, softness and “imperfection” abound. There is nothing overstated or strained. The work is as humble as the subject. Each click of the shutter was made by a finger with dirt under it's fingernail.
I received this book at an inflection point in my photographic practice, having just finalized the layout of my first photobook, The Boy in the Wild Orchard. I was already asking the question of “Where do I go from here?” The eternal innovator inside of me was pushing for a dramatic departure from my previous work. Jardins came to me like an angel messenger. Through these images, Anne Immelé redeems the familiar and immediate world which, for me, had fallen into a state of “not enoughness”.
As I sat with the images, the word that kept coming to me was “permission”. I was permitted to be who I am and where. Back to the humus I go. Thank you, Anne, for this eternally necessary blessing.
Learn more about Anne’s work. You can also purchase this book directly from Mediapop Editions.
