Our profile for November 2011 is on Linda Rutenberg, a Montreal-born native, who has been a photographer for 30 years. She has become particularly known for her striking images of flowers taken at night, revealed in a series of books, starting with The Garden at Night: Private Views of Public Edens (2007), which has been published by an American-based publisher, ECW Press. This has become not only a niche for her but also a passion. Rutenberg has taken photos in more than 35 gardens in Canada, the United States and England. A trip to Japan for 2012 is in the planning stages.
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by Perry J Greenbaum
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| Linda Rutenberg: "My mission is to help people appreciate the world, to take the time to see the beauty around us." Photo Credit: © Sheldon Levy, 2011 |
Linda Rutenberg loves the night for many reasons. For one, she has attained a measure of fame for taking pictures of flowers and plants at night, which she has achieved by camping out (with her husband) in gardens of the world— working and wiling away the midnight hours when most people are asleep. In doing so, Rutenberg has followed her pursuit and passion of photography from the darkroom to the darkness of night, capturing striking images of the garden's permanent residents in their natural habitat.
No doubt, Rutenberg has carved out a niche in the world of art and fine art photography. She also has another reason to love what night offers, the power to remain anonymous and in darkness uncover its hidden secrets using a little light. To be sure, there is a long history of photographers who have worked at night, acting as its chronicler of events. For some notable photographers of the past and present, the street is where the action lies, with people, buildings and the urban architecture mixing together, revealing its human stories. Even so, it's flowers, plants and nature in general that appeal to Rutenberg, and not people, at least photographically, she notes: "I really don't shoot people. I am thinking of starting a portrait series, but I haven't done very much in terms of portraits."
Such reveals much about Rutenberg, who is project-driven and has spent much of her professional career as a working photographer thinking and looking for interesting projects, filling out grant applications and fundraising from corporate sponsors and friends to finance the projects that are her passion. Such is and has been the way of many artists the world over, needing funds to pursue their art. For Rutenberg, it's a necessary means to an end: in her case, to get to another garden and chronicle the events of the life of flowers. It is in the pursuit of these creative endeavors that mark many, if not most, creative types.
It's true that flowers are more cooperative than people, who tend to be unpredictable and have their package of temperaments and moods. People can be prickly and unpredictable. Flowers, on the other hand, remain beautiful and mysterious, but not opinionated or argumentative. They sit pretty, waiting to be photographed, even in the darkness and stillness of the night. "It's a privilege to be allowed into a garden at night," she says. "It's very quiet; it's very spiritual. In the English gardens, in particular, you really feel the ghosts of the past."
Not surprising, the interview takes place at night, and we get to the business at hand shortly after the photographer and I arrive. Rutenberg is a self-described energetic lady, who is by all accounts project-driven. Standing five-foot-six, she seems younger than her fifty-nine years. She has been married to Roger Leeon, her companion of twenty years, who accompanies Rutenberg on her many sojourns to the gardens at night, which now number more than three dozen places in Canada, the United States and England. Until last year, the couple were using a Volkswagen camper, but that is no longer the case, it having given up the ghost. Rutenberg has a son, Jeremy, who is twenty-six, who has not followed his mother into an artistic career. In a light defense of the Rutenberg genes, she says, "he's interested in art."
But the other half of the team is her husband, Roger Leeon, has become, according to Rutenberg, "a lighting expert." So much so that they have found an effective almost patent-like method to achieve the results that Rutenberg wants: "We still shoot the same way, with one flashlight. I tell him what I want and he would do a bit of lighting. It's like painting with light."
It's true that many of the photographs seem like paintings, with enough detail yet having a sense of mystery about them. "We have a joke where my husband says that he's the creative person, with the lighting, and I only press the button."
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| Rutenberg plays piano. On the music stand is sheet music of the blues genre. "I sometimes play," she says, having much in common with pianists. "I really like to work alone, and I have to be my own boss. I have lots of energy and different ideas." Photo Credit: © Sheldon Levy, 2011 |
Rutenberg's credentials as a photographer and creative artist are impressive. She has worked as a freelance photographer since the 1980s; owned a photo lab and a gallery, and has taught students privately, which she still does in her studio. That is, when she's not off somewhere in a garden. The walls are lined with her work, her photographic creations, and her many books are lined up on the shelves, displayed in prominent view. Her books include The Garden at Night: Private Views of Public Edens, The English Garden at Night, and an award-winning work, Mont Royal: A World Apart, a one year’s exploration of the Frederic Law Olmstead Park that sits in the heart of Montreal. It has fond memories for many, this writer included, and Montrealers call it "the mountain."
No doubt, it's a studio of a well-organized person who knows what she wants and how to achieve it. In front of a window opposite the entrance door, rests an upright piano, blues sheet music on the stand. The studio has some history, its own chronicle. It is located in the former RCA building on Lenoir St., whose origins date to 1908, and which is situated in the Saint Henri district of Montreal, in the city's south-western end, a once-thriving industrial area.
The Berliner Gramaphone Company constructed the building, and in 1929 it became part of RCA Victor Corporation, for which the building became affectionately known in Montreal. The factory turned out records and gramophone equipment, and later satellites. That stopped in the 1970s, and the building has new owners. Today, the building is home to many artists, although Rutenberg said that many are leaving since the new owners are in the midst of modernizing the building. Rents will likely go up, but Rutenberg says, "she's staying."
When asked to name photographers she admires, Rutenberg thinks for a while and comes up with three names: Bresson, a French master of modern photojournalism and developer of street photography; Brassai, famous for his night-time images of Paris in the 1920s; and Michael Cannon, a Canadian-born photographer now living in Los Angeles, California, who has an interest in the "emotional aspect and impact of what an image can evoke."
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| Photographs and prints line the studio walls and floor, which is well-organized and well-lit. "We all see the world completely different. We could all go to the same street corner and shoot and we would each come up with something different." Photo Credit: © Sheldon Levy, 2011 |
Linda Rutenberg was born in Montreal in 1952, and lived in a middle-class area of Montreal, Cote-St-Luc, where she attended West Hill High School. Her parents never discouraged her from a creative profession. "My father never sat me down and said, 'I don't want you to go into the arts' or 'You should be a doctor or lawyer.' I was oriented towards the arts and I guess for girls it was OK."
Two memories come to mind that focus on cameras. In her formative years, she "has a picture of herself holding a little Brownie camera when she was twelve or thirteen." Then it was the trip to Israel and her stay on a kibbutz. "I ended up buying a Minolta, my first 35mm camera." She took a few courses at the Saidye Bronfman Centre, in the Snowdon district of Montreal, but mostly she says, "I was self-taught. It's the type of person that I am, who has to do rather than read manuals. I learn by doing."
After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts (BFA) in film and music from Concordia University in 1975, she worked as a summer intern at the National Film Board in Montreal, which was instructive in terms of self-knowledge. "I knew then that I didn't want to become part of a team, which is key to film-making." She then turned to teaching as a good career prospect, since it involved a measure of independence. She completed the one-year teaching program at McGill University and taught as an elementary-school teacher for a couple of years. "But that wasn't what I wanted to do."
So, it was back to university, where Rutenberg completed a master of fine arts (MFA) in Photography from Concordia University. During this time, around 1982, she took a two-week intensive course in photography that would decide her fate, so to speak. "I came out of it deciding to become a photographer," she says. "And it has been my life ever since then." That included a long stint as a freelance corporate photographer, where she worked by day to pay the bills and by night to develop her craft and style. By then, she knew that she would eventually have to do something with the night, because, as she put it, "I was always drawn to the mystery of night-time."
In 1995, she opened Camera Lucida Image Centre on Saint-Laurent Boulevard near Sherbrooke Street West, an area called "The Main," for its centrality in the olden days. The facility housed a darkroom rental facility, a lab, a school and a gallery. In 1997 she left Clic and opened Galerie Mistral, a fine art photography gallery in Montreal, Canada. Both are now closed: the darkroom facility because the digital age made such facilities redundant; and the gallery when her business partner decided to start a family in 2004.
For Rutenberg, after years as a freelance photographer and owning businesses, it was time to seriously pursue the personal. After searching Montreal for places that held, what she calls "that night-time mystery," which includes the necessary ingredients of subdued lighting and stillness, she settled on industrial areas, such as by the Lachine Canal. Many former large manufacturing concerns had their homes on this stretch of land; it held a history that modernity had yet to erase.
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| Nepenthus: As Rutenberg says about this photo, applies to many others taken at night using only one flashlight as a source of illumination: "Everyone tells me that the pictures look like paintings. Photographically, I am working with only one flashlight, which is unheard of. Everyone is very intrigued by this." Photo Credit: © Linda Rutenberg, 2011. Used by permission. |
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| Torch Ginger: "It's about discovery," Rutenberg says. "A photographer has a tool that forces you to become more curious about things that you are interested in looking at." Photo Credit: © Linda Rutenberg, 2011. Used by permission. |
During this time when she was improving he craft, taking photos of night in and around Montreal's industrial sites, she got a call from an American magazine, Landscape Architecture Magazine, in August 2005, to shoot at the 200-acre Redford Gardens, in Grand-Metis, Quebec, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, 350 kilometers (220 miles) east of Quebec City. "They asked me to go up to the Redford Gardens on the Saint Lawrence River north of Quebec City and to shoot the International Garden Festival.
The initial idea was to simply shoot in the early-morning light. Rutenberg, who had been experimenting with night-time shooting and had a passion for the mystery of the dark, decided it was a good time to marry her two interests:
The director said, "I'll give you a key to the gate and you can come early in the morning." At the time, my husband and I had a Volkswagen camper, and I said, "If you don't mind, just lock us in to the gardens." Suddenly, we realized that we were going to be spending the night in the garden. So, I said, "Would you mind if I photographed the gardens at night?" He said, "Absolutely not."Rigging a flashlight onto an extra tripod with duct tape, they now had their source of light. They traipsed gently among the flowers. "We just went out and shot; we had fun." After returning home to Montreal, Rutenberg downloaded all the images. What she saw took her breath away. "They were very exciting and fascinating. I realized that I had never seen anything like that before." Nor did anyone else. So, when she approached the Montreal Botanical Garden (Jardins botanique montreal) to shoot the Chinese Gardens and the lantern festival at night, she was met with enthusiasm. "It was then that I knew I had a great project," she says.
The project in question would take a year, in which she photographed the Montreal Botanical Garden at night, capturing all four seasons. This took place concurrently with another project, photographing 20 gardens in four Canadian cities and 16 American cities, including New York Botanical Garden, Chicago Botanic Gardens, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Needless to say, such involved tight logistics and a rigorous working schedule, all the while traveling between places in their Volkswagen camper. The couple would photograph two or three American gardens and then drive up to Montreal to shoot another season at Montreal's botanical gardens, and then make the drive south into the U.S. again.
Exhibitions and books followed, including After Midnight: Through the Seasons at the Montreal Botanical Garden and The Garden at Night: Private Views of Public Edens, which includes an essay by noted Canadian writer, Christopher Dewdney. Soon after, there was an opportunity to shoot in the lush gardens of England, which took place in 2008. In her book, The English Garden at Night: Intimate Vision of Public Edens, she describes her experience:
During the spring of 2008, each night after everyone had gone to sleep, Linda Rutenberg and her husband Roger Leeon, got dressed, grabbed their gear and stole out into the nighttime world of plants and flowers. Their mission was to explore and photograph the enchanted nocturnal domain of ten of England’s most beautiful botanical gardens.So many gardens. So many photos. It's understandable why Rutenberg hesitates, slightly, to name a favourite garden in the dozens that she has had the privilege to walk around. But, when prodded, she does: "The Lost Garden of Heligan," a wild, untamed garden in Cornwall, England, which has been resurrected to its former glory chiefly through the efforts of Tim Smit, a Dutch-born British businessman. "It was completely grown over, abandoned, because all the men had gone to war during World War Two." The garden is part of The Eden Project, which contains two biomes, planted landscapes, including vegetable gardens, and the world's largest greenhouse.
Having procured permission for their visit, they set about each garden searching for the extraordinary flower, the secret passageway or special point of view that gives us an unprecedented vision into a world that has rarely been seen before. This poetic journey is very special in that it transports us into these hallowed bastions of beauty, history and memory at an unusual hour of the day. The ghosts of landscape architects and well known dignitaries abound. One feels surrounded by a profound tranquility and a spiritual quality that comes from the centuries of thought, creation and recreation. Capturing the extraordinary beauty of the garden at night can be elusive and difficult. After dark a transformation takes place. Stillness, a windless quiet, allows discovery and contemplation of what by daylight had seemed a familiar place.
Yes, it's about transformation to beauty, and entering a different world, wherever that might be geographically or spiritually. Her next project is scheduled for 2012 in Japan and its native plant life. That should prove delightful, intoxicating. In many ways, Rutenberg is a historian doing with her camera what writers do with words. She chronicles the flowers at night, which are beautiful and have their own mysterious narrative about them.
With her Nikon digital camera, a D700, ever-ready and her husband as lighting maven, the two are safely ensconced in a beautiful cocoon of their own choosing. It's easy to see the appeal, to view the mystery and capture a sense of it, showing it to the world to behold. For some, it's a world, often dark and mysterious, even foreboding. But not so for Linda Rutenberg who wants to share her view of it with all of us.
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The Three Faces of Linda Rutenberg
Photographs (unless otherwise indicated): © SL Levy, 2011
Text © Perry J Greenbaum, 2011.
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