Poetics of Place

Lynn Geesaman’s photographs deal with human interaction and intervention with nature. Her subject matter is the formal gardens and parks created in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The design and especially the typography evoke the feeling of the formality and rationality by upending some common, traditional book formats. The size of the book and page format are arranged so that there is a lot of open space. The photographs and text columns sit low on the page. The large leading makes the line lengths read as abstract lines. Within these lines, however, are the fascinating organic ligatures that Mrs Eaves—a reinterpretation of the eighteenth-century typeface Baskerville—beautifully affords. But the most important aspect is to reproduce the photographs as faithfully as possible with just two colors and a tinted varnish. All the factors that add up to make a good photography book—good photographs, good printing, good design—were all in register in producing this book.