Shortly after I published a previous article detailing the impact of my first visit to the sublime Bloedel Reserve, I received a lovely note from Ed Moydell, the reserve’s new Executive Director. It seems that he and I shared something in common — we were both deeply moved by our first impressions of Bloedel and we both wished that more people outside the gardening community knew about the place. In pursuit of the latter, Ed offered to take Sara and I on a behind the scenes tour of the grounds, where we took in the sights and smells of Fall as we discussed the past and, more importantly, the future of Bloedel Reserve.

Bloedel Reserve is luckier than most organizations and experiences that are vying for the attention of people these days in that not only is the place itself amazing, but it has an incredible history — a rich genesis story of family, love, art, forestry, and architecture that is fun to turn around in your head as you reflect on what the place means to you.

Narrative such as these offer an avenue for understanding and sympathy that, in turn, leads to deeply felt connection on a personal level. For instance, there’s a reason why a whole new crowd of people all of a sudden wanted to go see Prince live in concert after the semi-autobiographical film Purple Rain came out. The fact is, that once you give something a context — a framework for understanding — even the best experiences somehow seem better and more interesting. It’s a fact that concerts seem better when you know the words to the songs, but they seem doubly awesome when you feel like you know the performers themselves. More locally, one of the smallest, slowest towns around — Forks, WA — became a tourist destination just because it was the setting for vampire love in the Twilight book series. People naturally try to project a narrative onto everything they encounter, and they love it when that narrative already exists. Bloedel Reserve might not quite have vampires (or Prince), but the place does have a story to tell.

Bloedel does have challenges, though, as they try to start a conversation with a new group of would-be visitors. Even though they’ve got the charm and the pedigree, getting the word out to a new generation that may not exactly be open to hearing anything about a “garden” is a challenging project, to be sure. How do you make a place like Bloedel sound relevant to people before they experience it for themselves? How do you communicate the poignant environments, the history, the architecture, and the unmistakable feeling (energetically relaxed?) this place instills in you? Is this a brand you can deliver on with just history and a walk through the grounds, or do you have to add another layer or two to the experience? What are those other layers? Parties? Picnics? Concerts? Lectures? Interactive Video? How many layers can you add before you’re not telling the same story anymore?

You can’t shout a bedtime story, but there’s always a way to get more people to hear you without sacrificing the effect of what you’re saying. In today’s hyper-connected world, people are learning that they don’t necessarily have to talk louder to spread a story. Instead, they try to get the community to retell the story amongst themselves. Going viral is the new network TV. Fortunately for Bloedel, a good story is first ingredient in this elusive recipe.

Anyway, this challenge — of perception, appeal, and publicity — is one of the many things we discussed with Ed while we were on our walk. We also talked a lot about the recent improvements and future plans for the grounds at Bloedel.

A big draw of the Bloedel experience is the way that you almost feel like you’ve got the place to yourself as you explore its vast acreage. In order to increase the amount of visitors to the Reserve — and still retain this feeling of solitude — the park is on a trajectory to add even more pathways and open up more areas of the grounds to the public. One of the most exciting is called Fern Hill.

Fern Hill is on the eastern side of the grounds down the hill from the main house and close to the water. Once it is open, you will be able to enjoy numerous vistas overlooking Puget Sound as you wind your way through the ferns and giant trees of the forest. Adding more opportunities for ocean views highlights another unique and very ‘Northwestern’ aspect of Bloedel Reserve. When I think of this part of the country, the combination of water with lush green forests is very much at the front of my mind. This is a tiny slice of Puget Sound in its most elemental state.

At the end of our tour, Ed brought Sara and I into the guest house in the middle of the Japanese garden. A building tailor-made for hosting, this low-slung retreat is a nexus of glass, wood, and paper. If Mad Men’s Bert Cooper was looking for a vacation home on Bainbridge Island, this building would certainly do the trick. The place, designed by architect Paul Hayden Kirk, is amazing — possessing of a feeling of structure and openness that stems from the fact that none of the interior rooms are completely walled off. The open floor plan coupled with the 360 degree wrap-around porch makes this house the ultimate place to throw a soiree.

Outside, a zen rock garden calms the spot where the swimming pool used to be. Family friend and Pulitzer prize winning poet Theodore Roethke drowned here in 1963, the victim of a heart attack. The family ordered the pool filled in the very next day. There is no plaque, but the mysterious power of this hidden history lends this part of the garden a dark but redemptive essence.

In fact, it is easy to imagine that you are being accompanied by various spirits as you walk the grounds of the reserve. This is a place where people lived, and in many ways it feels occupied still. Perhaps Ed should set up a summer movie night where everyone can sit on the lawn and watch My Neighbor Totoro, Hayao Miyazaki’s lively ode to forest spirits, friendship, and family. This might be a fun way to introduce a whole new generation to the wonder and the magic that the natural world communicates to those that take the time to listen.

Bloedel Reserve is a truly a place for wonder and magic. Go Listen.

In the 80′s, Prentice and Virginia Bloedel opened their former home to the public as a collection of gardens. Like all gardens, it is a curated, supernatural experience of nature. As if listening to a ‘greatest hits’ record of natural beauty, walking the grounds was an inspired dialogue  for someone left, too often, without the time or patience to seek out these sublime combinations in the wilderness. Unlike most other gardens, however, Bloedel Reserve is big enough to come across like the real thing. It is at once both wild and tamed — anarchic and groomed. It manages to be represent both inspiration and artwork all rolled into one.

One has the suspicion that the unique flavor of Bloedel Reserve has its roots in the union of personalities that birthed it. Prentice and Virginia were possessed of two very different sensibilities when it came to the things they fancied. Prentice was part of the Bloedel family — owners of a far reaching timber empire. He was Yale educated and, as a young man, desired to teach, but he was lured back into the family business. The way that he took to the industry, however, suggests that it may have the been the job he was born to do. He pioneered the economical practice of using sawdust and other mill “wastes” as fuel as well as the practice of reforestation of lands that were logged by planting saplings as the land was cleared. Overall, one gets the impression that he loved nature, the woods, and promoted man’s responsible and economical use of natural resources. He was attracted to the grounds that became the reserve because of its large acreage and rugged beauty.

Virginia Bloedel, however, fell in love with the French-style main house that occupied the plot (the Bloedels purchased the land and main house in the early 1950′s). She was lover of beauty and order. She filled the house with art and Louis XVI style furniture. She passed her love of art on to her daughter (also named Virginia), who ended up collecting (with her husband Bagley Wright) the bulk of what is now the Modern collection of the Seattle Art Museum. All the parts of the estate that seem to have an ordered class and an European beauty I attribute to Ma Bloedel.

There is a reflecting pool (pictured top) in the center of the grounds. It was the Bloedel’s favorite place to hang out in the garden. A single bench sits at one end of the pool, and a vase of bright flowers sits at the other. It’s a surprising venue for quiet contemplation.

The large shallow pool was built with the guidance of landscape designer Thomas Church and was later reworked by Richard Haag, who added a tall rectangular hedge around the whole thing. In a way, this place encapsulates the spirit of the entire Reserve — the surprising presence of man’s mind and hand in the middle of wild forest.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with my lady exploring Seward Park. We heard some tap-tapping towards the end of our walk that, upon further inspection, turned out to be this guy. Pileated Woodpeckers are surprisingly big — the size of a crow — and they really do have the classic ‘Woody Woodpecker’ shock of red plumage on their heads. For a North American bird, he looks almost tropical.

As I approached, this nervous fellow went hopping up the tree, keeping an eye on me the whole time. After I backed off, though, he descended once again to resume the excavation he had started below.

My girlfriend bought me this plant, a striking Calathea Lancifolia, from the Volunteer Park Conservatory here in Seattle. If you live in Seattle and haven’t been, the Conservatory is a classic paradise well worth an hour of your afternoon. They have a few of these little guys integrated into their tropical exhibit, and it is perhaps my favorite species in a room filled to the brim with incredibly beautiful and curious flora.

Why do I like this little plant so much? Several reasons should be fairly obvious from the photos above. Besides the fact that it is simply a visually stunning plant — with contrasting green variegation, a gradient green, gently waved edge, and a bold purple underside — my favorite aspect is how the markings on the top of the leaf appear as if the silhouette of a different sort of plant has been imprinted over top. It makes me think of a plant wearing a plant suit, which amuses my easy-to-amuse mind to no end.

Speaking of plant-within-a-plant, the notion of self-reflexivity is also at the heart of this particular fancy. Within the realm of the arts, the aspect of High Modernism that I always respected was how closely form and philosophy are married. If you were in art grad school in the 60′s, you probably would have been evangelized to the notion that a piece of artwork is most true to itself — most correct — when all of its visual, objective qualities reflect both the reason for and action of its creation. This notion began with abstract artists like Josef Albers (below left) who was interested in light and color and whose painted forms echoed the shape of the canvas they were painted on. This idea reached it’s apex with artists like Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella (below right). Stella made works where each mark was the width of the brush he painted it with, and whose canvases where sized to efficiently house the number of marks needed to complete the composition. Pollock’s work looks crazier, but his dynamic sloshing of paint is just as much an overt index of the painting process. They are very simply paintings about the act of making a painting.

So, while it might be tempting to see Calathea Lancifolia as a particularly Modernist plant because of the way that its appearance echoes its meta reality as a plant, it turns out that there something hindering this interpretation. There is an alternate way of spinning the appearance of plant-like markings on Calathea Lancifolia’s foliage. They can be seen not as a self reflection, but instead as a mask. While there is a certain self-consciousness — a redundancy of selves — to the wearing of a mask, any deeper reality must acknowledge the falseness of a second face. Once the train of thought turns towards the issue of costume, we enter into the realm of the Post-Modernists.

Starting with Marcel Duchamp, whose Rrose Selavy and Monte Carlo Bond characters set his reputation as the early father of Post-Modernism, and finding it’s full concentration within the work of Cindy Sherman (above), using disguise became a means of subverting the rules and exposing the artifice of Modernist ideals. It’s fun to think of Sherman as the anti-Stella, as her work exposed photography not as a reflector of any sort of truth, but as an agent for boundless uncertainty.

So, at the the end of the day, I think that within my little Calathea Lancifolia, I get both a modernist masterpiece and a post-modernist schizophrenic. Either that, or its just a really cool looking plant. Only time will tell how this little plant is to positioned by art historians within the hallowed canon of fine art.

(plant photos courtesy of Sara Lawrence at Soft Dimension, Albers and Stella images courtesy the unexpectedly excellent Saint Louis Art Museum, and Cindy Sherman images courtesy the Internets)

When I was young, everything I knew about Fashion was embodied in the long legs and plucked eyebrows a small group of elite models that were known simply and ubiquitously as the Supermodels. They were in all the makeup ads and all the best music videos. Photographers like Peter Lindbergh (who took the above photo for Vogue in 1991) and Herb Ritts (taking a break from his typical muse: well muscled men) captured these amazons in crisp black and white photographs that exposed us to these mythically unattainable figures in an era that otherwise heroicized the flawed and the authentic. I have a hard time reconciling Cindy Crawford and Kurt Cobain, but they somehow managed to both rule MTV at the same time without any irony whatsoever.

One of my favorite Supermodels is the now largely forgotten Tatjana Patitz. When I look at photos of her now, I can’t help but think that she seems especially austere — so German. This photograph looks like it could have been taken by Leni Riefenstahl. The image below, also by Lindbergh, casts Patitz as a sort of blue-eye to blue-eye match for Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.

I did an image search for Patitz recently after a random memory trip while riding the bus to work. I was struck by the unassailable way that the Supermodels were styled and photographed back in the 90s. They seem especially statuesque and hard-edged compared to today’s magazine girls. The Supermodels all look like real grown up women. That Crawford, arguably the most approachable of them all, was the the most popular of the group seems to have taught advertisers to go with a look that is a little more friendly, a little more girlish.

Linda Evangelista

Christy Turlington & Elaine Irwin

However, given our collective penchant for Mad Men, the Rat Pack, and classic cinema, I can easily imagine this type of mature, composed and strong feminine model coming into favor again as a representation of our desire. The era of the 16-year-old model could be coming to a close. Also, I can imagine all of our current economic woes pushing the country temporarily back towards a conservatively European model of beauty like they did at the end of the 80s. Adriana Lima watch out!

Szabo taught at Malverne High School on Long Island for more than twenty five years (from the early 70′s to the late 90′s) where he was able to take a number of remarkably candid photographs of teenage life (and hair). I’m so into these photographs that I’ve been wondering how I would be able to undertake a photo project like this without seeming like a total creep. Maybe I’ve missed my chance, and I’m now stuck documenting the lives of the over-30s.

Nevertheless, looking through these photographs has got me humming Sound Of Silver over and over while looking through my old yearbooks trying to remember what I’ve tried to forget. Clearly I’m not alone. The forward to TEENAGE was written by Cameron Crowe, and other auteurs — from Sofia Coppola to Terry Richardson — have drawn direct inspiration from the posturing, sexual yearning, and social exploration of the world that the collection depicts.

Check out the book (if you can find it) and be sure to take a moment to look through more great photos of this ilk on Szabo’s gallery’s site.

L to R: Canon 5D Mark II, Mamiya RZ67 Pro II, Leica M7

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About six months ago, I decided I was going to realize the dream of exquisite image making, and I ordered the much lauded digital photo and video breakthrough camera, the Canon 5D Mark II. As a multimedia designer, I justified the purchase as one that would be beneficial to my work; I could now produce the imagery and video that I needed for my web projects.

Well, I’ve used the camera for paying gigs a few times, but the real value of the purchase has been in the reminder of how damn satisfying it is to take photos with a beautiful camera — the weight, the shutter click, the control, the image quality. I’d been hobbling along with little digital point-n-shoots for years, capturing memories more than making images, really. My nifty pop-up Polaroid SX-70 and my old Pentax 35mm SLR had long been sitting on the shelf, relegated to being objects of curiosity — remnants of an earlier era.

Now, however, with my new digital friend egging me on, my inner photographer has been reawakened, and the desire to geek out on camera gear is growing stronger. Now I want a little classic Leica in my jacket pocket, I want to snap some gorgeous style photos with a Polaroid modded Mamiya, I want to hang a red bulb in the bathroom and develop black and white pics all day long. Well, maybe not the last bit.

Actually, now that I think about it, venturing back into the world of film is a bit like opening a black hole of gear, shutter release hesitation, and endless incremental expense.

So, perhaps I’ll just be satisfied to look forward to the next firmware update for the Mark II, and will hold off on stockpiling film cartridges in my crisper for just a bit longer. But, man, I gotta stay away from Craigslist, or who knows what might end up in mail on its way to my door.