The Garden grew from Alessandro Imbriaco’s sustained work on housing problems in Rome. For more than five years he worked on housing issues in Rome, and that investigation pushed him outward, into the peripheral and hidden spaces the city prefers not to see. One of those places is a small swamp beside the Aniene River, beneath a flyover on the ring road circling the eastern outskirts of Rome. Attempts to designate the area a nature reserve failed, and the publisher describes it as abandoned and without environmental protection at the time of the project. Yet it shelters a family: Angela, six years old, born and raised here, and her parents, Piero from Sicily and Luba from Russia, living in a shack under the road. Their existence is invisible to the drivers passing above.

Imbriaco, born in Salerno and based in Rome, makes this invisibility the book’s real subject. His camera stays close to the swamp’s own terms — its water, vegetation, improvised dwelling, and the daily life of people who have found refuge where the city discards ground. The photographs do not argue a policy case or sentimentalize Angela’s family. They hold two facts together: an abandoned landscape that failed to become a reserve, and a household that has quietly made it a home. Bill Kouwenhoven wrote the text for the book.

The Garden won the European Publishers Award for Photography in 2012 and was nominated for the Kassel Fotobook Award in 2013. Dewi Lewis Publishing issued it as a hardcover with a double-flap jacket, 72 pages, 34 colour plates, and dimensions of 268mm by 200mm. Imbriaco’s earlier recognition includes the 2008 Canon Award for Young Photographers and World Press Photo 2010 Contemporary Issues, 2nd prize stories, along with Premio Biennale Giovani Monza and Premio Pesaresi 2011. He was shortlisted for Talent: Foam 2011, PHE Ojo de Pez, Premi Ponchielli, Lumix Award, and Atlante Italiano MAXXI, and in 2011 was selected for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass.

For a collector, the interest lies in what the work does with documentary. Imbriaco came to this subject through sustained reportage, but he arrived at a place where the usual distance between photographer and subject gives way. The Garden holds a city’s edge, a failed conservation effort, and a family’s makeshift sanctuary in one tense frame of reference. The award record and the book’s compact, carefully produced form make it a considered acquisition for readers of contemporary European documentary photography.