COLUMBIA, SC.-Contemporary Photography and the Garden - Deceits and Fantasies looks at gardens as a subject in photography produced in the last decade by 16 American and European artists. Ranging from depictions of gardens as tranquil havens to places of tension, where beauty coexists with inexorable forces of nature, the photographs reveal varied responses to the physical structure, atmosphere and symbolism of the garden. Contemporary Photography and the Garden - Deceits and Fantasies is organized by the American Federation of Arts. The exhibition is made possible, in part, by a grant from the A.R. Brooks Trust. Additional support is provided by David L. Davies and John D. Weeden and the Founders Circle of the AFA.

Among the nearly 70 images on view are depictions of Claude Monet's Giverny, as well as gardens in Scotland, Japan, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico and the United States. The photographs represent the remarkable diversity of these international gardens. In addition to beautiful images of gardens from around the world, the exhibition also explores darker visual metaphors for the garden, presenting gardens as ominous places or fantasies through various photographic manipulations of the images.

The artists included in the exhibition are Sally Apfelbaum, Daniel Boudinet, Gregory Crewdson, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Sally Gall, Lynn Geesaman, Linda Hackett, Geoffrey James, Len Jenshel, Erica Lennard, Sally Mann, Catherine Opie, Jack Pierson, Jean Rault and Marc Quinn.

An exciting feature of Contemporary Photography and the Garden - Deceits and Fantasies is the commissioning of new works by Sally Mann and Catherine Opie. Mann explores Englishman Edward James's surrealist garden in the jungle of San Luis Potosi in Mexico; Opie investigates the affinities among disparate gardens, ranging from estates in Santa Barbara and the Hamptons to community gardens in New York City and a men's prison in Minnesota.

Julia Brown, director of the AFA says, "We are thrilled that Sally Mann and Catherine Opie responded with such enthusiasm to curator Thomas Padon's invitation to create new work especially for the exhibition. Looking at all of the photographs in the exhibition, I am still struck by the diversity of artistic expressions to the form, atmosphere and symbolism of the garden."

Some exhibition highlights include a room-sized installation by Fischli and Weiss that surrounds the viewer with projected images revealing the variety and kaleidoscopic color of plants in the garden; Sally Apfelbaum's mural-sized, multiple-exposure prints of Giverny reveal the lush and lavish atmosphere of the garden, as do Linda Hackett's color-pinhole photographs of Long Island gardens, and Sally Gall's silver-gelatin images of gardens in Brazil and Hawaii. The panoramic silver-gelatin photographs of Italian gardens by Geoffrey James; Len Jenshel's intensely hued photographs of gardens in California and South Carolina; and Erica Lennard's rich silver-gelatin prints documenting the sculptural forms and textures of Japanese gardens, all demonstrate the abundant beauty of the garden. Jack Pierson's vividly colored photographs are tightly focused and detailed compositions in which a single element within the garden is often isolated.

Other artists play against the notion of a garden as an idyllic site and provide a dark visual metaphor for the manipulation of nature. Some of them, such as Lynn Geesaman and Jean Rault, create photographs that present gardens as places whose artificiality would seem to fend off human interaction. Gregory Crewdson - through carefully constructed tableaux - creates disturbing color photographs of gardens that hint of nature run amuck; Marc Quinn's Italian Landscape series features photographs that document his installation for the Prada Foundation in which he composed a "garden" of exotic plants and a lawn of grass coated in silicone and presented in a refrigerated glass-enclosed environment.

The curator of the exhibition, Thomas Padon, is Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs at the AFA where he has organized many major exhibitions, among them, Eternal Egypt: Masterpieces of Ancient Art from the British Museum; Degas and the Dance; and Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective. He was also the curator of the touring exhibition Nancy Graves: Excavations in Print (1996), for which he wrote the accompanying catalogue raisonné, and Shadows in the Floating World: Silhouette in Ukiyo-e Prints (1990), presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition and co-published by the AFA and Harry N. Abrams Inc. includes an essay by Mr. Padon on the garden as a subject in contemporary photography since the mid-1980s and a text by artist Ronald Jones discussing the Cosmic Garden he created in Hanover in 2000. Artist Shirin Neshat offers her reflections on the garden's significance for Iranians, and Robert Harrison, Professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University, traces the garden in the Western cultural imagination from Gilgamesh to Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. The catalogue is available for sale in the Museum Shop.

The AFA initiates and organizes art exhibitions that are presented in museums around the world, and also publishes exhibition catalogues and offers educational and professional development programs for the museum community and general public. For more information about AFA, visit www.afaweb.org.

After the Columbia Museum of Art, Contemporary Photography and the Garden - Deceits and Fantasies travels to Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, W.A.