Brad Temkin's work Private Places, ...

Brad Temkin's work Private Places, Photographs of Chicago Gardens, explores the artist inside each gardener.

Temkin is a landscape photographer, an artist who relates to his equal artists whose medium happens to be soil.

"It's a way for the community to express themselves artistically without necessarily claiming they're an artist," said Temkin, a Columbia literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learning photography teacher since 1984. "It gives them a chance to work with their hands and make something that's beautiful. I think everyone answers to beauty and likes to have it around them. They can be clear and open in this safe place. And level though it's outside, it has the privacy of a compass in their home. The thing I find in the same manner interesting is they decorated with personal touches that bring a faculty of perception of who they are."

He saw statuary and "pieces of themselves" during his garden pursuit In Wicker Park, a homeowner planted petunias in planters shaped like lambs, and painted the pointy tips of a worked iron fence in alternating white and r A woman with a depressed brick cottage in the same neighborhood affixed art external realitys and gardening tools to her exterior walls in a collage.

Temkin notes, "The great thing about gardens, you live with it a while, and you start thinking, 'I'm gonna change this nearest year.' It's the same mentality as making art. I felt a real [sense of] simpatico with gardeners. It's the proces I'm a gardener as well, on the other hand consider myself an amateur compared to most numerous people I [visited]."

Temkin's garden photographs started as part of the Chicago 2000 photography brew He continued shooting, and the main division came out in 2005. Temkin's "enhanced" colors loan a fantasy feel to the gardenscapes.

"I'd overexpose overdevelop to give me this saturation that was a little more than usual. I enhanced what I'd already seen" he said.

Whether in Pilsen, Lake View, Wicker Park, Skokie, Evanston, Ravenswood or Edgewater, he erect home gardeners to be a welcoming chance Some even gave him clews so he could snap pictures whenever he liked.

"Most of them saluteed me friendly, but they were curious as to with what intent I would be so interested in what they were doing," he said. "And they really derive pleasure fromed that somebody was asking about wherefore they did certain things."

To behold some other images from Private Places, travel to www.bradtemkin.com.

lbaldacci@suntimes.com

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