THE GARDEN A selection from an ongoing project photographing the Valley Garden and Old Dairy Allotments at the University of Southampton
In 2016, I'm finally making a start on pulling this large body of work together. From the introduction to my 2007 book Brilliant Corners, which was the starting point of the project:
To name a series of photographs after the iconic album by Thelonious Monk is obviously to invite unflattering comparisons. The "corners" in question here are both those literal corners where one neglected thing turns into another, and the more metaphorical corners that define one's inner world: "If I hold up one corner and a student cannot come back to me with the other three, I do not go on with the lesson" (Confucius, Analects).
The thirty one plus one corners in this book were all discovered on the University of Southampton's Highfield campus, over the past two or three years. Needless to say, such scruffy moments of revelation do not reflect the neat view of a university and the process of learning that the public relations people have in mind, and nearly all of them have been tidied up or built over in the meantime. I was lucky to happen along, and intend to keep on looking for those other three corners.