Dress by Nicholas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga, from “Hanging Gardens: When the Bloom is on the Line,” 2004

This image is a part of the Hanging Garden series photographed by Austrian photographer Alfred Seiland for the New York Times Magazine and was published on May 16, 2004, and featured in in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture, 2011), edited by Kathy Ryan. Ryan, longtime director of photography for the magazine, recollects: “My first instinct often is to bring in photographers who might not normally be shooting a particular kind of work. There were a lot of beautiful flowered prints that season, which led me to think of Alfred Seiland, an Austrian landscape photographer. I remembered seeing a picture by him of sheets hanging on clotheslines, years before, and that was a direct inspiration.”

Here, Seiland plays with the façade of the colorful dress against an equally bright and textured background of orange and red flowers. As is conventional for his works, this image is part of a series, and when seen together the photographs have a pictorial language of their own. Created through the use of color and other contrasting elements, the images suggest a mood and space that seems to exist only in and for that picture.

C-Print
Edition of 25 and 3 Artist’s Proofs
Paper Size: 14 x 11 inches
Image Size: 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Signed and numbered by the artist

Alfred Seiland (b. 1952, St. Michael, Austria) has exhibited works at Kicken Berlin, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum der Moderne Kunst in Salzburg, Austria, and the Kunsthalle in Emden, Germany. Seiland lives and works in Austria. Known primarily as a landscape photographer, Seiland’s work for the New York Times Magazine has covered a range of subjects from fashion to his more recent project on a prison in a small Austrian town, Leoben.