Geoffrey James’s The East Meadow, Central Park (1991) was part of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 1988 project “to photograph the present state of the parks, private estates, subdivisions, and cemeteries designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), North America’s most important landscape architect,” as the introduction to the above-mentioned publication states. Over a seven-year period, the photographers Robert Burley, Lee Friedlander, and Geoffrey James explored Olmsted’s landscape projects—from his famous Central Park in New York and Emerald Necklace in Boston to his lesser-known Mount Royal Park in Montreal and Lake Park in Milwaukee—to capture their beauty and ingenuity. In an interview with David Harris on June 23, 1995, James describes the essential role that parks play in contemporary society: “I suppose the real subject of the parks is their persistence. At the heart of most of these places, the sheer strength of Olmsted’s vision and abilities persists ... On certain beautiful mornings when the light is clean, they are exquisite places to be. And you have them to yourself.”
Geoffrey James was born in Wales in 1942. He immigrated to Canada in 1966. A self-taught photographer, he has also written more than a dozen books and monographs. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Palazzo Braschi in Rome, the Americas Society in New York, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. He has taken part in group exhibitions at Documenta IX in Kassel (Germany), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt (Germany), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Works from his vast photographic repertoire are included in the largest museum and institutional collections in the world. James has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. He lives in Toronto.
