© Dana Fritz from the series 'Garden Views'

Edward O. Wilson and others have written extensively about biophilia (the instinctive bond between humans and other living systems) and while I can’t speak for others, I do believe that my need for some kind of nature is authentic and visceral. However, some of this can be experienced on a walk or bicycle ride through my neighborhood when I feel the warmth of the sun on my skin and the fresh air in my lungs. But it occurs to me that neither of these experiences is visual or constructed. I get a great deal of satisfaction from growing a vegetable garden, watching the songbirds in my yard and raptors in the park across the street, visiting a farm to buy food, strolling through a centuries-old Japanese or Italian garden, and hiking in the desert. Each of these activities occupies a different point along the nature-culture spectrum. Perhaps we have had an authentic need to engage with natural materials and processes that we can manipulate, but that still grow and change sometimes unpredictably. Once we have shaped them, they call us back to keep them in shape or remind us of our failure to do so. Gardens result from a human-nature relationship that is satisfying to both the gardener and the visitor, and perhaps even the plants themselves if you consider Michael Pollan’s concepts of human and plant co-evolution in the Botany of Desire. We need them for nourishment and cultural expression and they need us to reproduce.

© Dana Fritz from the series 'Garden Views'

© Dana Fritz from the series 'Garden Views'

My opinion about the human-nature relationship has evolved significantly because of the Terraria Gigantica project. At first, I saw them as more oppositional but now believe it is too late for the idea of defining nature by our absence. As Bill McKibben, William Cronon and Michiel Schwartz point out (in very different approaches,) we have fundamentally altered the planet and using “wilderness” as the reference point for nature is not useful to move forward. The giant terrariums serve as complex symbols for where we are now and I have grown to appreciate them for their inherent strangeness as well as their scientific and educational value. While Biosphere 2 had a somewhat dubious original mission, all these sites are now focused on education and in some way on research. I do still wonder if visits to them supplant time spent out of doors for some people, especially children. (In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv writes about the detrimental effects of children not playing outside.) However, because of their enormous scale and density of plants, these sites produce a sense of wonder in visitors that may lead to future interest in the natural world. Being in these vivaria, one feels small yet awestruck (and perhaps even empowered) that humans can build and maintain such a place. I am fascinated by the structural elements of the architecture and landscape design and the combination of live plants and often indistinguishable artificial (but mimetic) elements such as plants and rocks that make up the exhibits. Within all of this structure, seemingly unplanned natural systems arise such as when a bird from outside builds a nest or when green slime develops on walls. All of the sites I photograph are educating visitors about our altered world and the important role we all play in it. While I applaud these efforts, I have to wonder if most visitors consider the philosophical implications of such large scale displacement and elaborate simulation. These are some of the many issues that I consider when making photographs.

© Dana Fritz, from the series 'Terraria Gigantica' 

© Dana Fritz, from the series 'Terraria Gigantica'

© Dana Fritz, from the series 'Terraria Gigantica' 

© Dana Fritz, from the series 'Terraria Gigantica'

© Dana Fritz, from the series 'Terraria Gigantica'

The publication of Terraria Gigantica is certainly a dream come true and while I am always pleased to exhibit and lecture about my photographs, more of my work and the associated ideas can reach a wider and more sustained audience through the book. However, the recent release of the book has coincided with a number of exhibitions and lectures that enable me to speak directly to people in the context of the prints as well as the book at a time of heightened environmental crisis. When I began the work in 2007, I did it to inquire about my personal and our collective understanding of Nature in the 21st century. While I am dismayed at the increasingly alarming reports of climate change and species extinction since then, I hope that a book like mine may play a small role in helping people to reconsider their relationship to the non-human world and to do what we can to change course for our planet. I am truly honored to have essays by three sharp thinkers who really understand my work and wrote about it from their own perspectives. In the introduction, William L. Fox (Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art) describes the photographs as prophetic, creative reports from the indeterminate zone where culture and nature are deliberately commingled [that] will be understood in retrospect as information from the future. In a long essay, Carrie Robbins (Curator and Academic Liaison for Art & Artifacts at Bryn Mawr College) provides context to the development of the project. She writes «Light enters the camera and the terrarium as the condition for both photographic and photosynthetic possibilities... At its etymological root, photography is writing with light; it is thus both culture and nature. In her photographs of human-made ecosystems, Fritz negotiates one paradox with another.» In the epilog, Rebecca Reider (Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All Possibilities, 2009, University of New Mexico Press.) addresses the cultural significance of the three sites in the book and human technological management of nature. She reminds us that we are all “biospheres,” and that as we all inhabit space between our own shiny creations, our simple needs to eat and breathe are utterly dependant on a world of plants, water and soil.

© Dana Fritz, from the series 'Terraria Gigantica'

While environmental issues are more pressing than ever today, after finishing Terraria Gigantica, I wanted to think more about how artists have understood and represented the natural world in the past. All of this time spent thinking about the compression and illusion of space that are designed into gardens and vivaria led me to how artists have used those strategies pictorially in landscape paintings. I became especially interested in traditional ink paintings from China and Japan where nature and humans are not generally understood as separate entities. I started wondering if I could make images that reference ink painting but remain photographic; If I could construct a view with borrowed scenery from disparate times and places; If I could create images with an abundant visual information that were still ambiguous in space and scale.

© Dana Fritz, Sawara Cypress, from the series 'Views Removed'

I was also tired of spending so much time looking at a computer screen and wanted to return to using film and printing in the darkroom. While this work might be more easily achieved using digital technology, I wouldn’t enjoy the process and challenge as much so I committed to analog processes. I also wanted to make photographs that were more spare than the multilayered, tight, and full compositions from Garden Views and Terraria Gigantica. In short, I needed some space in my mind and in my work. I have spent many years teaching a summer course in Japan, but it was during my Faculty Development Leave visits there, purposefully immersed in the imagined landscapes of ink paintings, Zen gardens, and bonsai collections, that I made the most progress on understanding the ideas and making photographs for the project. While Garden Views and Terraria Gigantica were more straight- forward in how I photographed idealized, human-shaped landscapes, in Views Removed, I am the one shaping the landscapes based on my imagination of an impossible ideal. It is my intention that these prints make clear references to traditional ink paintings but that their disruptive photographic process leads to questions about our relationship to the natural world, landscape views in art, how we construct ideas of landscape, and how we shape the land itself- themes that thread throughout all of my work.

© Dana Fritz, 'Views Removed'. Signed, limited edition, hand bound accordion book with embossed outer cover, vellum inner cover, 14 images, title page, colophon and short text describing the work. This self-published artist's book bound by Datz Press brings the vertical images from Views Removed into an accordion format reminiscent of Japanese folding screens.

© Dana Fritz, 'Views Removed'. The photographs in Views Removed render trees, stones and other natural materials in ways that their scale and perspective become ambiguous, combining more than one negative to create a "landscape view" that exists only in the final print. The composition and contrast in the resulting gelatin silver prints emulate the white paper background and equivocal space in ink painting traditions that are free from the technical constraints of photography. The photographs are inspired by questions about Eastern and Western pictorial space, landscape as construct, and the inherent tension between the real and ideal. (This edition is sold out.)

© Dana Fritz, 'Views Removed'. Signed, limited edition handscroll with ten 4"x10" images, title, and short text describing the work printed on Murakumo Kozo paper. This self-published artist's book bound by the artist brings the horizontal images from 'Views Removed' into an handscroll format that encourages the viewer to choose the landscape view at arm's length, even combining multiple images into new landscapes.

Books suggestions:
- Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, 2005, Workman Publishing Company
- Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, 2001, Random House
- Mieke Gerritzen and Koert van Mensvoort, editors, Next Nature (with an essay by Michael Schwarz), 2005, BIS Publishers

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LINKS

Dana Fritz (website) 
Terra Gigantica, University Press New Mexico, 2017 (book)
Dana Fritz was featured on Urbanautica Institute Annual Awards 2019 (catalog)