Eric Klemm | Labyrinth

Like his Metamorphosis project, which was completed in 2005, Klemm’s exquisite Labyrinth suite from the year before had also dealt in transformation within the landscape—specifically, in this case, with an indexing of what, at one point in history, was deemed to be the cosmetically ameliorative changes wrought upon the raw landscape within certain formal gardens of France (Versailles) and Germany (the vast garden of Schwetzingen Castle, near Heidelberg) by the impress of a regal will-to-design (most of us know Versailles, but the spectacular rigidities of Schwetzingen—which turns out, by the way, to be the asparagus centre of Germany—were quite unknown to me). Here, in these dark, moody photographs (some in colour, some in black and white), the landscape has been willed into a sort of para-architecture. Stately avenues have thus become vectors in the landscape-as-diagram and—of greater importance to Klemm—the trees have been everywhere shaped, sheared and generally curtailed until they approach the status of columns, pillars and other built structures.

Having assumed a photographic stance and point of view that seemed quite deliberately to echo that of the awed and humbled first-time visitor to a city made of skyscrapers, Klemm shot the geometricized vegetation from below so that, for example, in the Schwetzinger Castle gardens, he was able to show its trees, now carved into pillars, as lacy lifting structures isolated—so we can read their new function as faux-piers—against the weight of the lowering skies. In another spectacularly telling view of Versailles, a tiny pedestrian makes his way along a pearlescent, light-filled roadway that just fronts a stupendously bulwark-like screen of brutally snipped, knife-edged trees—a leafy yet strictured construct so vast, black, dense and impenetrable it now looks like a bulky office building: Versailles manicured into New York.