an essay by Zak Dimitrov
Paul Guilmoth’s At Night Gardens Grow was the photographer’s first solo exhibition in the UK (Winter 2021, Leica Gallery) and coincided with a new book housing the eponymous project, published by Stanley / Barker. Below, Zak Dimitrov’s exploration of the images in this project moves between the experience of prints and the printed page.
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Guilmoth’s work creates fictitious worlds, residing in a pulsating place, somewhere between the personal, almost intimate, and the bizarre, unusual, sublime. Every image is gifted with its own individual title, sometimes as long as a full sentence, thereby making a statement that language will play a crucial part, and indeed it does.
We see a picture of two young girls on the cusp of adolescence with long, lush, black hair. One of them is topless while the other one is wearing a white top. The image appears to be taken at night with strong directed light at the teenagers. Their demeanour is reminiscent of Sally Mann’s photographs of her children – ever so slightly sexualised but not to the point where they would be considered crass or offensive. Nothing too unusual so far until we read the title – “Twin cousins after Grandpa’s funeral”. Another photograph of a perplexed looking woman is inexplicably named “Apple tree” even though there is no tree in sight. Both life, in the form of a baby in a bed of sick flowers, and death, the corpse of a cat with a bunch of flowers for her funeral, are present here. The baby photograph can make the viewer uneasy – after all, it’s a baby that has perhaps been abandoned. On closer inspection, however, it looks as though it’s a collage, a cut out, but it’s impossible to say with absolute certainty.
A photograph of a dozen slugs slimily gliding on a sheet of glass is aptly titled “Moving with the pace of clouds” – the viewer can instantly imagine in their mind’s eye the slow gliding of clouds, reminiscent to the pace of a snail. Foliage, a crisp waterfall and what at first glance appears as clouds but on second may be divine light is in the frame of “Water (Holy)” and indeed there is a spiritual element to it – one can feel nothing but sublime awe. Spiders, severed animal limbs hung by children on a piece of string, a mother having just emerged from the water with a wet, limp cigarette in her mouth, booming waterfalls. Guilmoth utilises symbols, metaphors and folkloric legends – there are baptisms, funerals, births, holes in stone, fires. The quality of light is consistent almost throughout the whole body of work – the pictures have been taken at night, giving them a sense of mystery and foreboding, with strong frontal light that gives the impression of car lights.
As the photographer says, “A handful of years ago I began to make sculptures with the spider webs I’d find on the edge of the pond. Throughout the book you’ll see the different ways in which these take shape. This photograph was taken by harvesting a spider web from a tree, with the help of two friends, and laying it on to the surface of the pond. Before this I had never imagined that a spider web would float so perfectly. It was a very hypnotic experience.”
And indeed perfect it is; so perfect, in fact, that at first glance one might think it’s either a collage or some sort of other post-production manipulation. The cobweb is a recurring motif throughout the work – it crops up between flowers, or it is floating in water. Its beauty hides in its sheer fragility and the perfection of its symmetrical geometric structure. It certainly is one of nature’s undisputed marvels – beauty doesn’t always require grand scale, sometimes it hides in the minute details that we regularly pass by and often ignore as we see them as either insignificant, cumbersome or we just don’t see them. In “Silk in Water” the cobweb almost glows, it’s lit in such a fashion that it appears both fragile but also durable, resilient. It bears a resemblance to a manmade mesh, a fruit and veg bag.
It is always exciting to see an exhibition accompanied by a book, even more so when the only place in which I have seen the images up until then has been my screen. The images in this project acquire different meanings depending on their experience in book form or exhibition. The Stanley / Barker publication of Guilmoth’s work is not intended as a catalogue, rather it is an elegant and exquisitely designed object, with linen cover and tipped-in image.
The exhibition at Leica Gallery included a variety of sizes, from 10×8 inch to larger, 20×25 inch prints, which added to the dynamic of the project. They were all framed in the same style – light ash floating frames – but some were on a white wall while others were on a black wall which also evoked a further response in viewing. The prints themselves, immaculately mounted and framed, are silver gelatine fibre-based paper. Refreshing to say the least when it becomes common practice, largely due to unaffordable costs, for photographers to shoot film, yet print using digital methods. The quality of the paper combined with the crispness and astonishing detail provided by the large-format camera result in an unparalleled display of the work, one that cannot be replicated in book form. It would be a moot point trying to compare the two looking for winners, and I would argue that book and exhibition complement one another, like two limbs of the same body.
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Paul Guilmoth’s print exhibition At Night Gardens Grow was held at Leica Gallery, London (11 Nov – 5 Dec 2021) and their book At Night Gardens Grow was published by Stanley/Barker.
For further viewing: pguilmoth.com
With thanks to Zak Dimitrov for this essay.
