Descanso, seen in a singular light
WARREN MARR speaks slowly and thoughtfully as he strolls through Descanso Gardens. He takes a path that he has wandered for years. It winds through the tall camellias and the 150-year-old oaks.
An acclaimed photographer whose work is kept in the permanent collection at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Marr has just published a collection of prints taken over the course of a year. “Descanso: An Urban Oasis Revealed” is an exploration of this 160-acre space, one of Southern California’s oldest and most beloved botanical parks.
A fifth-generation Californian living in the foothills near Descanso, Marr, 61, is perhaps best known for his work in the Utah desert and in Indonesia. In the new book, he invokes some of the effects that have worked so well for him before. He employs seasonal icons -- dry autumn grass, fallen leaves, winter-bare branches, and colorful, fruiting buds -- to suggest the year passing, giving the book a sense of time.
Like the environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy, Marr is drawn to patterns in natural environments, but unlike Goldsworthy, he sees them without touching or altering his world. He lets seasons and the shapes of trees and gardens do the work instead. When he shows a circle of yellow sycamore leaves fallen on grass around a thick sycamore trunk, the image seems archetypal.
One morning last month, as small wisteria flowers fell one by one from an awning at Descanso and landed in Marr’s cropped gray hair, he spoke of his years spent wandering the paths of the garden. He did not brush off the flowers. Rather, he let them accumulate like dust as he began by explaining how fog coming up the valley from Los Angeles creates a spectacle of light.
Question: There is something about the light in Descanso that you have captured. How do you explain it?
Answer: In this part of Southern California, the fog comes up the valley from Glendale right to here, and this also happens to be at the limit of the vertical rise of the fog belt, so you’re right in the diffuse top layer. When it’s foggy, the gardens sit inside a light tent. It’s just amazing. It’s wonderful. Descanso’s axis is oriented east-west, so that it gets good light in the morning and evening regardless of fog. That might explain the basics, but being visually open to what’s there is most important.
Q: What inspired you to photograph the gardens?
A: After 9/11, it got really hard to travel with all the gear I had. I was looking for something I could do locally that I could really sink my teeth into, a good project that would take my mind off not only 9/11, but the war that was coming over the horizon like the four horses of the Apocalypse. I’ve always contended you can find beauty anywhere if you know how to look for it, if you’re receptive to it. It was a challenge for me to come here and find beauty in a place that I knew intimately, that I was going to repeatedly. When I go somewhere I’ve never been before, all of the obvious good images pop out and I take them, and if I’m on a schedule, I leave and I’ve done my job. It’s much more of a creative challenge to go back to the same place over and over and over again. It became a mental exercise to just let go. I came very often and just let things appear.
Q: One thing that is obviously missing from your book are the crowds that typically flock to Descanso. Not a single person appears in these photographs, which give the impression that Descanso is floating outside of civilization. Is there any falsehood in your photos?
A: My original goal was to photograph the gardens in such a way that they would seem untouched by man -- looking for places that don’t show walkways, sprinklers or ponds. After a short time, though, I realized this vision was limiting, and it wasn’t truly representative of the gardens. Everything there exists the way it does because of man’s hand. Even the oak trees, huge and massive and numerous, exist because they didn’t get cut down for firewood for missions, and they are so large because of the camellias growing under them requiring extra watering. As far as the physical lack of people, that is how I see the gardens. There are plenty of times when nobody is here. I actually had to work more around garden workers than around visitors.
Q: Obviously, this is a place to get away from people on a certain level. If we are coming to the gardens to seek solace, what are we seeking solace from?
A: When you step into the gardens, your time clock stops. You don’t have to be somewhere, you don’t have a deadline, you don’t have the traffic around you. You can come and exhale and be here. This divides refuge from our over-scheduled urban existence.
Q: In a way, a garden is a contrivance within the city. It is a scripted place. Does that seem odd to you?
A: Everything in the city is scripted. Walt Disney once expressed an interest in the property. It could have also been a freeway interchange, a residential subdivision, a municipal dump. The original gardens and the mansion were sold to the county of Los Angeles in 1954. Now they are operated by the nonprofit Descanso Gardens Guild. That’s the way it has worked out.
Q: Do we truly need places like this?
A: I think it’s hard-wired. We have a genetic connection with the outside world. Do we need them? Absolutely.
Q: What would happen if we didn’t have them?
A: We would collectively have a nervous breakdown.
Q: How would you recommend people go about photographing their own gardens at home?
A: When I teach a landscape photography class, one of the assignments I give my students is to find a spot in the garden and simply sit there for a couple of hours, observing how the light moves and changes over time. Anyone can do that, and if you haven’t done it before, it’s an exercise that really opens your visual perception. The obvious thing would be to work both early and late in the day, when the light is less contrasty. Digital cameras are great for the instant feedback, and then I would advise being persistent. Study other people’s images to figure out what makes them work or not work. Don’t get hung up with equipment. Some of the most powerful photographs ever made were done with not-so-fancy gear. The most important thing is what’s between your own ears.
Q: How did you go about framing your photographs of the gardens?
A: I walked around with this eyepiece, and when I found what I wanted, I set it there on the ground and went back for my equipment.
Q: So, this is your secret.
A: It is my tool. Have you ever heard of the term “maya”? Maya is a Sanskrit word that means illusion, and it refers to the world around us. It means that what you experience as reality is different from my experience. Your color perception is different from mine. You filter things out as either important or unimportant differently than the way I do. In the end what your eye is seeing is merely pixels of information. Your brain is what integrates those pixels, based on your own personal experience, into what you perceive as important.
Q: But if you’re suggesting that your images were merely illusion, I might disagree. I find them to be somehow pure, as if lacking in maya, as if they show the essence of Descanso, exactly what the garden was made to look like.
A: Perhaps.
Craig Childs has written many books, including most recently “House of Rain: Tracking Vanished Civilizations Across the American Southwest.”
