Dimensions: support: 404 x 304 mm
Copyright: © The estate of Keith Arnatt | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Keith Arnatt's photograph, simply titled "Gardeners," features a woman holding a small dog, posed within a domestic garden setting. Editor: It’s strikingly composed, almost theatrical. The contrasts are stark, highlighting the textures of both the human figure and the garden ornaments. Curator: Arnatt often explored themes of the everyday and the absurd, using photographic documentation to question social norms and expectations. Think of the role of women within the domestic sphere. Editor: And the use of garden gnomes, the owl, and the frog... these were mass-produced, inexpensive ornaments, elevating the mundane to the symbolic through material choices. Curator: Exactly. The woman’s gaze, the dog’s presence – these elements challenge our perceptions of nature, culture, and the construction of identity within these spaces. Editor: There's something quietly subversive about it, a subtle commentary on class, taste, and the artificiality we impose on the natural world through these very objects. Curator: Precisely. This photograph provokes questions about our relationship with the environment and the cultural narratives we project onto it. Editor: It certainly lingers in the mind, urging me to consider the hands that shaped the materials and the narratives we build around the most ordinary objects.
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Gardeners 1978–9 is a large series of black and white photographs that depicts individuals standing outdoors in the gardens they tend, which vary in character from sprawling fields in the countryside to small urban front gardens. Although the gardeners’ poses, expressions and clothing differ, they are all shown full-length standing in the mid-ground of the scene and looking towards the camera. The selection of forty prints from this series in the Tate collection (Tate T13087–T13126) was made and exhibited in 1979 for Keith Arnatt’s solo exhibition at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London. A different selection of prints was exhibited in his 1989 touring solo exhibition Rubbish and Recollections (Cambridge Darkroom; Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Ffotogallery, Cardiff). Arnatt took the photographs that make up this series during 1978 and 1979. To do so, he visited the sitters at their homes, photographing them in their own gardens. The series title, Gardeners, focuses the viewer’s attention on the gardeners rather than the gardens themselves, although the way in which Arnatt presents the individuals surrounded by the grass, foliage and sometimes concrete of their settings, with little else in view, suggests the intimate connection between the gardeners and their land. The repetitive nature of the composition and poses across each of the forty photographs also has the effect of drawing together a diverse group of people who have been photographed as a result of a shared hobby.
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