Director's Choice Award - "Ancient Pine Canopy, Ritsurin Garden" by Lynne BuchananDirector's Choice Award
Ancient Pine Canopy, Ritsurin Garden Lynne Buchanan
Media: Platinum-Palladium Print Size: 15" x 10" Frame Size: 12" x 17" Framed Price: $1200 Non-Framed Price: $1000
PROCESS My platinum-palladium prints are contact printed from digital negatives. My printer has been modified to include Piezography Pro inks to get the greatest tonal range when used in conjunction with QuadToneRIP software. These images have been printed on acid free Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag Fine Art Paper, which is 100 percent cotton fiber with no optical brightening agents. The paper is hydrated before the chemistry is applied, to achieve a smoother coating and better absorption. The platinum and palladium are combined 1:1 and then mixed with an equal amount of ferric oxalate. The solution is applied by rod to the hydrated paper and returned to the hydration chamber for an additional hour and a half to allow the chemistry to soak in. Then the negative is placed printed side down on the paper and exposed in a LED light box with a vacuum seal to ensure maximum detail. After the print has been exposed, it is hydrated for an additional 5 minutes before being developed in disodium EDTA for 10-15 minutes. Then it is rinsed in water for 30 seconds and cleared in sodium sulfite for 15 minutes. After rinsing it again, the print is cleared in a final bath of tetrasodium EDTA for 15 minutes. It is then washed in running water for 30 minutes.
STATEMENT My work explores the interconnectedness of existence and the lessons we can learn from nature. Embracing impermanence and mortality, navigating ambiguity, recognizing that shadows contain future possibilities, and finding light in dark times have always been important themes. I am drawn to the balancing affects I experience during my moving meditations through the natural world and how connecting with nature puts our fleeting time on Earth in perspective in terms of the natural order and deep time. In April 2025, I was fortunate to visit Japan for three weeks, where I visited many Buddhist temples and Shinto Shrines as well as carefully tended gardens and wild areas. I was deeply affected by the reverence Japanese people show for all beings and their recognition that spirit exists in every manifestation of matter, even rocks. I was deeply touched by how they support ancient limbs with tree crutches, venerating these ancient sentinels and helping the trees live into the present and future. My father was a philosopher whose life’s work focused on the Janus Paradox. Consequently, I was raised to understand the importance of simultaneously looking to the past and to the future when determining what to value and how to act in the present–which is but a fleeting threshold between these two states. Although I make both black and white and color prints, my preferred medium is platinum-palladium to underscore the preciousness of life and to offer a record of my encounters with landscapes that will outlive me. My work is a sacred remembrance and an homage to that which is ephemeral and that which has endured through generations.
The Ancient Black Pine Canopy, Ritsurin Garden image was made during my trip. There are over 400 black pines in this garden that was established in the 17th century, many of which have been pruned and shaped for over 300 years. Looking up into the canopy felt like peering into an infinite cosmos where time is unending and not linear. It was as if I had encountered a place where multiple stages of being were overlapping and inseparable and I couldn’t help but wonder how much these trees have witnessed and how much longer they will remain standing.
Another transformative experience occurred in the Saihoji Rinza Zen Temple in Kyoto. Before entering the garden, visitors trace the Enmei Juke Kannon Gyo Sutra about prolonging life. The sutra is dedicated to Kannon, the Japanese version of the Chinese Kuan Yin, who achieved enlightenment but chose to remain in this world to help others. The garden, founded almost 1300 years ago, is described as a place of origins and new journeys and promotes self-reflection. The aim is for visitors to find peace and be able to return home more in touch with their authentic selves, so they can move toward a more enlightened state of being. Inhabiting a garden that has existed for centuries in order to help visitors understand their place in the stream of life amidst its liminal states and ambiguities made me feel I’d entered my spiritual and philosophical home. Having just lived through the impact of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina, this garden also gave me hope, since it was initially a white sand garden before becoming covered with beautiful mosses following numerous floods.
It is said the garden can be experienced in five seasons, the four seasons we typically acknowledge and a fifth that comprises the states between seasons. There is a heart-shaped pond created by two islands. The one in my image is Asahi-ga-jima, the Island of the Rising Sun and the other is Yuhi-ga-jima, the Island of the Setting Sun. Before I made this image, I walked through the garden slowly, allowing my perceptions to take me deeper into myself as a living being immersed in this ancient but ever-changing space where people have taken care not to tread on the mosses, allowing them to flourish into the future and evoking the value of existence itself. My hope is that by reflecting on these images viewers experience a sense of peace in these uncertain times and are inspired to become more compassionate and renew their own connections with nature and their authentic selves to better live each day with equanimity and compassion.
BIO The work of poetic climate artist Lynne Buchanan focuses on the importance and threats that face waterways and forests around the world. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans and the Bishop Museum in Florida, and it has been featured in The New York Times. Buchanan’s photographs have been exhibited in over 60 solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries across the United States and in Europe. Her latest book of reproductions of platinum-palladium prints and haikus, The Poetry of Being, was published by Daylight Books in May 2023 and received silver awards in the Budapest and Tokyo International Foto Awards. She is also the author and photographer of Florida’s Changing Waters: A Beautiful World in Peril, published by George F. Thompson Publishing. Public speaking includes talks given at the Miami Book Fair, as well as at the Society for Environmental Journalism and the North American Nature Photography Association’s Summit. Buchanan has also contributed articles for Waterkeeper Magazine and her work has been featured in numerous publications including features in Black + White Photography, Photobook Journal, Artdoc Photography Magazine, Shots Magazine, South X Southeast Photomagazine, and Lenscratch, among others. She is the recipient of masters degrees in art history/museum studies from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and in creative writing from the University of South Florida in Tampa. She also received a bachelor’s degree in art history from New College in Sarasota, Florida. Buchanan currently works and resides in Fletcher, NC.
Director's Choice Award - "Ancient Pine Canopy, Ritsurin Garden" by Lynne BuchananDirector's Choice Award
