Creative roots

It’s guaranteed that some friend or family member is an amateur photographer and has bored you with portraits of flowers.

Equally certain is that close-ups of tulips, roses and/or mums are ubiquitous as calendar illustrations, desktop wallpaper or scenes (sized to match your sofa) painted and sold by "starving artists" at suburban hotel banquet rooms.

Professional artists also take photographs of flowers and gardens, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art is staging a special exhibition of some of them to complement the 176th Philadelphia Flower Show, sponsored by the Pennsylvania Horticu-ltural Society and running at the Convention Center through this weekend.

"The Silver Garden" continues through July 17 in the Julien Levy Gallery and features at least 60 photographs from some of the country’s most renowned artists. All of the works come from the permanent collection and any excuse to present them is welcome, even if the curatorial concept is a reach.

The "silver" in the title refers to the presence of silver salts in most photographic materials, thus explaining why black-and-white photographs are often called "gelatin silver prints."

The exhibition includes a who’s who of American photography, including Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Imogen Cunningham, Paul Strand, Edward Steichen and Brett Weston. Two Philadelphia-area artists, Andrea Baldeck and Roger Matsumoto, are being shown at the Art Museum for the first time.

The luminescent qualities of the prints are comparable to the richest, smoothest and softest deep flower colors. The satiny blacks and pearly whites and all degrees in between give these pictures a scrumptious look.

Interestingly enough, many of the photographers in the show were or are avid gardeners. Strand, who shot pictures all around the world for more than 60 years, concentrated in his later years on his garden at Orgeval, France. He did an entire portfolio of pictures titled The Garden. Ray Metzker, an established Philadelphia artist, has published over the years a set of landscapes from Tuscany and nature scenes from such diverse locations as France, Utah, Wisconsin and Virginia.

Cunningham, whose career was connected at various points with Edward Curtis, Weston and Steichen, was a well-known portrait photographer of California celebrities, including James Cagney, Cary Grant, Joan Blondell and Wallace Beery, and political figures Upton Sinclair and Herbert Hoover. But many would claim her greatest work was close-up shots of plant forms. Their mysterious and sometimes sexual natures were startling for their time. Cunningham grew many of the plants in her own backyard as she minded her children.

Others have found inspiration in the urban weeds of Chicago, gardens in Honolulu, Alaskan trees, roses in France, or forests and fields. One sophisticated artist known for urban New York scenes, Robert Frank, became fascinated with his own backyard in California.

Baldeck, a multitalented musician, physician and photographer, was most recently seen in a show at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology with landscape and nature pictures from the Far East. In her curriculum vitae, she professes a love of the outdoors with many mountains trekked and says she is a serious gardener.

Katherine Ware, curator and head of the museum’s department of photographs, notes, "As pastimes, photography and gardening share similar frustrations and satisfactions. Both offer delayed gratification in that the result of creative toil is usually deferred and sometimes unexpected. In the darkroom tray, a photographic image blossoms forth from the interaction of silver and chemicals as astonishingly as a bud issues from a bare twig in springtime and as magically as a stem emerges from a small, hard seed in the soil."

There can hardly be any quarrel with Ware’s selections despite that she has many thousands of choices from the museum’s collection.

But most artists and photographers dislike being categorized. One story from a Cunningham biography tells of her and two other famous photographers – Adams and Dorothea Lange – engaged in conversation. Lange complained that she was regarded as a documentary photographer, and that Adams was known as a landscape photographer.

Lange continued to note that Cunningham was known for plant forms, when Imogen interrupted her: "Oh people have forgotten that, Dorothea. They’ve forgotten that I ever did plant forms. You know, I’ve tried my best to sell people on the idea that I photograph anything that can be exposed in light."

The Silver Garden
through July 17
Julien Levy Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway
215-684-7500
www.philamuseum.org
tickets: Adults, $10; seniors (62+), $7; students with valid ID, $7; ages 13-18, $7; 12 and under, free; Sundays, pay what you wish