Temple of the Winds, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne
2007
This photograph forms part of Christopher Köller’s Gardens series, which was produced over a ten-year period. To create this series, Köller travelled to famous gardens around the world and photographed them in different seasons and weather conditions. The dream-like aesthetic of this series, which Köller has exploited in other bodies of work, is the result of using a cheap medium-format film camera. The plastic lenses in these cameras tend to produce soft-focus effects, and images are often distorted by lens flare and light leaks. This photograph shows part of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. Köller used the attributes of the plastic camera to transform this highly constructed ‘natural’ environment into a strange and mysterious world.
(2016)
Chromogenic prints are printed on paper that has at least three emulsion layers containing invisible dyes and silver salts. Each emulsion layer is sensitive to a different primary colour of light (red, green or blue). The development process converts the hidden dyes to visible colour depending on the amount of light it was exposed to. This type of paper is commonly used to print from colour negatives or digital files to produce a full-colour image. It can also be used to print black-and-white images, giving softer grain and less contrast than gelatin silver prints. Commonly known as c-type prints, chromogenic processing was developed in the 1940s and widely used for colour printing, including for domestic snapshots. While recent years have seen this process accompanied by ink-jet and digital printing technologies, chromogenic printing still remains in use to this day.
