'The Garden' is an ongoing body of work depicting Heck’s wife and two young sons in a variety of richly colourful surroundings.
The photographs draw upon Catholic iconography and other mythic pictorial traditions to develop a colour-based narrative evocative of spiritual archetypes and the processes of dissolution and rebirth. Completing its aesthetic fantasy through lavish clothes, gestures of dreamlike poignancy, and an Edenic environment, 'The Garden' expresses the supramundane innocence and spontaneity that art makes possible—a life lived in the direct, immediate experience of beauty.
Shot predominantly at the family’s home in New England, the series initially elicits comparisons with other contemporary photography confronting family life, such as Sally Mann’s 'Immediate Family'. But though the subjects of Heck’s photographs are ostensibly his family, 'The Garden'’s real subject matter is colour and the aesthetic possibilities of photography to create what it captures.
