The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) has just announced a gift of landscape photographer and architect Alan Ward’s digital archive, a donation they say provides both the public and scholars exposure to one of the profession’s most beloved practitioners. 

The Sasaki Associates principal’s bequest includes 2,500 photographs. Each will be made accessible through the Alan Ward Portfolios of Designed Landscapes section of TCLF’s website and is part of the “Related Content” holdings, which currently includes over 13,000 images depicting more than 2,600 sites across the world.

France’s iconic garden at Vaux-le-Vicomte is one recent documentary subject included in the trove, which features work from the United States and twelve other countries taken over a 50-year span. A total of 20 of 110 separate portfolios will be unveiled first as part of the launch. The TCLF says they are useful in demonstrating the process that underlies landscape design. TCLF President and CEO Charles Birnbaum added that they are also “integral to our mission of connecting people to places.”

“As an artist, Ward makes a two-dimensional abstraction of light, atmosphere, objects, and surfaces — itself an artwork; at the same time, he interrogates the whole of the work of designing landscapes, making and collecting views that reflect critically on landscape architecture’s wide field of production,” the current Chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the Harvard GSD, Reed Hilderbrand, wrote in an introduction to Ward’s 1998 title American Designed Landscapes: A Photographic Interpretation.

Ward says finally: “I chose The Cultural Landscape Foundation to donate this archive of images because the foundation has prominent visibility in making known significant designed landscapes, educating people about the importance of the legacy of designed landscapes, as well as being a leading voice when these landscapes are threatened. I envisioned The Cultural Landscape Foundation expanding on its tradition — by using this archive of photographs to help make known these significant gardens, parks, arboreta, and other sites. In comparison, I imagined donating the archive to an educational institution where the work would be filed away — materially and digitally — amidst large volumes of other materials, perhaps lost from view.” 

A supplementary Q&A with the artist can be found here.