Inside The New York Botanical Garden
Victor Schrager
Posted in Exhibitions, People on December 4 2008, by Plant Talk
Visitors to the annual holiday puppet theater production of The Little Engine That Could™, which opens this weekend in the Arthur and Janet Ross Lecture Hall, will enter through the Ross Gallery, where they will be welcomed by The Heirloom Tomato, an exhibition of bold, bright photographic still lifes. Here, Victor Schrager, the award-winning artist behind the images, talks about how he made these magnificent portraits of historic tomato varieties from the gardens of Amy Goldman. The two have collaborated on several books, including the most recent The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table as well as The Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower’s Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds (2004) and Melons for the Passionate Grower (2002), all available at Shop in the Garden.
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Victor Schrager is the photographer featured in the exhibition The Heirloom Tomato. |
The shooting to produce Melons for the Passionate Grower took one year. The Compleat Squash was done over two years. The Heirloom Tomato was planned to be much more extensive than either of those: The photographs would have to be done when the fruit were ready, so the photographs were made at all times of day in all kinds of weather. The project eventually lasted five seasons.
It was important to give the work its own unified sense of time and place—a quality I find in the best botanical illustrations and photographs, in vivid distinction to garden catalogs. To achieve this, I used a single artificial light in a studio I made in a barn near Amy Goldman’s garden. So the photographs took place in their own time.
During the first three seasons, I used an 8×10 wooden Deardorff view camera (the kind where you put a dark cloth over the back of the camera to see better to compose); the last two seasons I used a Sinar 4×5 digital view camera—the closest digital approximation to the qualities of the large-format transparencies I had made during the first three seasons and the most similar in use to my film camera. I would like to think you cannot tell which are which.
Various objects—teacups, marble blocks, colanders, spice cans, etc.—were used to put the tomatoes on a pedestal, giving each picture a unique architecture derived from the tomato’s place in domestic life in the kitchen and garden over its long history.
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on September 24 2008, by Plant Talk
John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
NYBG’s Farmers Market, which rolls in here every Wednesday through summer and fall, is a feast and a fanfare of fresh fruits and veggies. As beautiful as jewelry but full of thiamin and riboflavin, the produce glistens when the tents are first unfurled, and this year the tomatoes—Black Cherry, Sungold, Brandywine, Bicolor—seemed to glimmer like a Tiffany’s window of semiprecious stones.
Ah the tomato! This, the cynosure of the Solanaceae, is sweetly celebrated in an excellent new publication, The Heirloom Tomato, by our board member and chair of Seed Savers Exchange, Amy Goldman. The book is all about selecting, growing, and eating tomatoes, but the heart of the volume is a 150-page gallery of the fruit, a museum of Lycopersicon, with photographs by Victor Schrager, who turns even homely “Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter” into a Vermeer. The descriptions by Dr. Goldman include specs for each variety on size, weight, shape, color, and texture, and her interpretative material includes archival research and nuggets of oral history that illuminate our lost rural history as evocatively as a tintype.
The Heirloom Tomato is a book for anyone who loves gardening, plants, food, tomatoes, art and/or language. It is the third volume in the Goldman/Schrager collaboration. They created a template with two works on cucurbits: Melons for the Passionate Grower and The Compleat Squash, and they have now brought it to such a state of perfection I wouldn’t be surprised if they next turned their attention to okra, or maybe kohlrabi.
A selection of images from the book is on display in the Botanical Garden’s Arthur and Janet Ross Gallery in The Heirloom Tomato: An Exhibition of Photographs by Victor Schrager—Portraits of Historic Tomato Varieties from the Gardens of Amy Goldman.
Posted in NYBG in the News on August 12 2008, by Plant Talk
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Nick Leshi is Associate Director of Public Relations and Electronic Media. |
Over 40 years ago, Andy Warhol famously turned a can of tomato soup into a pop culture icon. Now photographer Victor Schrager has turned his camera lens on the tomato itself, elevating it to a high art. The September 2008 issue of Veranda magazine features two articles written by Tom Woodham, gloriously illustrated by Schrager’s stunning images of tomatoes from the gardens of Amy Goldman, a member of The New York Botanical Garden’s Board of Managers.
The pictures give justification for one of the magazine’s headlines, “Tomatoes: The Most Beautiful Fruit.” If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I imagine anyone viewing such a variety of shapes and colors would agree that this bountiful produce captured on film is beautiful indeed.
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