The peculiar starting point for P.A.N.O.R.A.M.A., Becky Beasley’s exhibition at Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp, is Edward Muybridge’s former garden in Kingston, as it is maintained and adapted by its current owners. The English photographer, after an early career as a bookseller and later on as a successful photographer in the US, had returned to England, serenely converting to gardening.
A panoramic series of twelve photographs were taken by Becky Beasley in the garden in the winter of 2009. Inspired by Muybridge’s own 360º panorama of San Francisco, their full titles were made by mapping the orientations of descriptions of the views in the panels of Muybridge’s work onto those of the Kingston garden. Beasley’s visits to the archives and to Muybridge’s garden have fuelled a narrative fantasy about his late sculptural project, allowing her to pair a fiction about him—his gardening project and his death—with a meditation on photography itself.
