Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #808362 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

From Amazon.com
Do you believe in fairies? If so, this book will delight you. "It wasn't produced for someone who isn't a believer in things magical," observes photographer Anne Geddes, who clearly is. What is also abundantly clear is that she appreciates the charm of babies and small children, and the role that fantasy plays in their young lives. Her tiny models become fairies, gnomes, sunflowers, water lilies, field mice, ladybugs, and peas in a pod in this amusing and endearing volume.

From Kirkus Reviews
Australian photographer Geddes (The Twelve Days of Christmas, 1995) is well known for her, well, strange pictures of babies. Now she sets the tots Down In The Garden ($49.95; Sept. 15, 1996; 160 pages; ISBN 1-55912-017-7). In full-page color photos (even some gatefolds), we see babies as pea pods, babies in cocoons, one newborn with butterfly wings resting on a mushroom, babies in flowerpots with bouquets on their heads. Mostly, all you see of them are their baby faces: with happy, isn't-this-a-riot expressions; astonished, how-did-I-get-in-here expressions; and, occasionally, perplexed, how-do-I-get-out-of-here expressions. A sweet bouquet of babies. (First printing of 150,000; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Ingram
An exquisite coffee table bookthis volume incorporates ingenious design and gardening wisdom to showcase Anne Geddes' fanciful images. From pots to plots, in flowerboxes and fields, Geddes' unique photos of babies and children show readers the profusion of life and joy to be found in a garden. Readers see the wondrous transformation of buds to blooms, and caterpillars to butterflies; find adorable baby faces amidst petals and pods; see birds in the bath, bees abuzz, and all kinds of critters at rest and play. Full-color throughout.

Customer Reviews

High Kitsch
Geddes' manages to degrade and isolate her subjects. Her prehistoric "cutsie" images, though appealing to a kitsch market, do not allow for a social comment to transcend the visual confines of her exploitive commercial "photography". In some senses, she could be seen as a radical post-modernist artist, as she abstracts the subject from social normality and removes any dignity from the development of the child, if that was her so calling in contemporary art. Yet it is frightening to be in an age where people will grasp such superficially degrading images. Geddes has made a personal fortune off photographing babies, subjects usually positioned in inhumane circumstances (ie: babies in flowerpots or dipped in custard), which removes human dignity and allows us to question Geddes moral intent.