Recovering Eden: The photographer in the garden

This dissertation explores the intersection of Paradise, art making, concepts of beauty and the social conventions that influence artists. My exploration occurs within the landscape genre, specifically the landscape photograph. For the purpose of contextualizing this analysis the dissertation is designed as an illustrated book where word and image occupy places of equal importance. Photographs are used as primary source material in this investigation. The work of six accomplished American photographers has been selected so that a lineage may become apparent in the portrayal of a pictorial vision of Eden. All the photographers chosen for the project made/make art that is centered on the paradisiacal landscape, an ideal that is interpreted by each individual photographer according to their gender, socio-political influences, personal spirituality and cultural orientation. The review begins in the 1860's with the work of Carleton Watkins, one of the first photographers of the western American landscape and continues with Timothy O'Sullivan. The review will segue into Modernism with Ansel Adams and Laura Gilpin and ends in latter part of the 20th century with two contemporary American photographers, Linda Connor and Marilyn Bridges. This particular analysis is structured upon a universal image of paradise as a garden and how that image has become culturally imprinted upon humans. The visual manifestations of Eden seen in nineteenth and twentieth century painting and photography are constructed throughout history. They represent use of art as means towards creating utopias. With this impulse to escape or change the status quo I have examined the connection of the appreciation of beauty to ethical transformation.