Centre for Creative Photography

View Original

Inspiration: Paul Guilmoth - At Night Gardens Grow

In Paul Guilmoth’s new publication At Night Gardens Grow, the night becomes a stage for a strange, folkloric story, unfurling from the landscape the artist calls home. Concentrating on one field in particular, the book is a constellation of black and white images depicting ghostly figures and glowing foliage, spiderwebs and moths, baptisms and waterfalls glistening at night. It’s a careful, deliberate edit, one that builds in an intense and palpable way, transporting us to a dark fictional world that teeters on the brink between dream and reality. There are symbols we know from age-old fables here—rabbits feet and wooden cabins, nymph-like, bathing women and mirrors in forests—but they’re different somehow, transformed in the darkness, like fairytales gone awry.