Collection Brings Out the Soul of Landscapes

It might seem odd to produce a garden book of black-and-white photographs, until you see the pictures of Alan Ward.

Ward, you realize soon enough, has done for the designed American landscape what Ansel Adams did for the wilderness, using panoramic and deeply thoughtful images to draw out the soul of a place.

In “American Designed Landscapes,” the reader finds 113 images of 18 properties, encompassing the landscape architect’s entire domain, from private estate gardens to campuses to cemeteries. All of them are renowned in design circles; a few are known to the wider public, including Dumbarton Oaks in Washington; the Biltmore estate in Asheville, N.C.; and the campus at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Yet even these familiar spaces take on a transcendental quality in Ward’s photography.

At Dumbarton Oaks, limestone balusters shine like beacons, the cedars echo the wispy nature of the sky, and there is a timeless quality about it all. It might be high summer or the dead of winter, or 1940 or 1997.

He has arranged one picture of Biltmore so that the grand mansion appears like a dollhouse in the background, insignificant, obscured by trees, while the eye moves instead across woodland, meadow and stream. An allegory of the triumph of the landscape designer over the architect?

By limiting his pictures to black and white or, more precisely, black, white and grays, Ward has removed distractions to reveal the essential components of superior design, including line, texture and the relationships between masses and voids.

“The photographs that are the most successful are the ones where you can see enormous amounts of contrast within the image,” said James Trulove, the Washington-based publisher of the book (Spacemaker Press; 129 pp.; $49.95; 202-543-5435).

Some of Ward’s photographs have been published before and used in scholarly exhibitions, but this is the first book devoted to his work, Trulove said. Ward is a principal in the landscape architecture firm of Sasaki Associates, in Watertown, Mass. He has been taking photographs for more than 20 years.

In order to be a superb artist, you have to be a superb technician. Ward uses a large-format view camera that allows wide-angle and panoramic views without distorting depth or losing clarity. He also develops the prints to further control the outcome, making sure, for example, that contrast is not so great that detail is lost either in areas of shadow or light.

To ensure the same standard in the book, Trulove said, he used a high grade of paper, and Ward traveled to Italy to oversee the quality of the printing.

“For me,” writes Ward, “the simplification inherent in black-and-white photography gives clear emphasis to the designed landscape, revealed not by color but by light, tone and contrast. Such a reduction, from complex color to shades of gray, is ultimately more powerful and poetic.”