Los Jardines de México gathers four series Janelle Lynch made during the three years she lived in Mexico City; read in sequence, they form a single body of work. It opens with El Jardín de Juegos (Mexico City, 2002–2003), her first project after the move, photographed with a 4 × 5-inch camera: the relics of a children’s playground reclaimed by vegetation and neglect. No people appear anywhere in the book. Donde Andaba (Mexico City, 2005), made with a 6 × 7-centimeter camera, sets wild plant life against architecture and extends the earlier series in content and form. Akna (Chiapas, 2006) gathers portraits of anthropomorphized tree stumps in a nature reserve—her first photographs with an 8 × 10-inch camera—and takes its title from the Mayan goddess of birth and fertility. The closing series, La Fosa Común (Mexico City, 2007), was also made with the 8 × 10 camera, in a functioning, century-old common grave at the center of the city.
Persistence and regeneration, not landscape as scenery, hold these projects together. Vegetation appears at various stages of its life cycle, and the settings are indicated only obliquely, so the photographs continue an inquiry into loss and death begun in El Jardín de Juegos while registering life and its intricate beauty. Charlotte Cotton has described Lynch’s approach as having an exquisite lightness of touch, one that keeps the meaning of the pictures from becoming too literal or over-prescribed.
The changing cameras shape how the book reads. The move from the 4 × 5 to the 8 × 10-inch view camera brings a different quality of attention to the subjects, particularly in the tree-stump portraits and at the grave site, where scale and detail carry much of the meaning. Across 80 pages and 41 images, in a hardbound volume from Radius Books with texts by José Antonio Aldrete-Haas and Mario Bellatín, those shifts register as progression rather than break.
For collectors of contemporary landscape photography, this is a concentrated early statement by an artist whose large-format photographs of urban and rural landscapes have drawn international recognition. Read in sequence, the four projects form an extended consideration of how life survives its conditions, and the editorial frame—sequence, texts, the persistent absence of human figures—gives the photographs a coherence that rewards attention to their ordering.
