Mara Magyarosi-Laytner
Mara Magyarosi-Laytner
The Untended Garden
84 pages
36 plates
11x7” Landscape
Smyth Sewn
2024
About the Book:
Throughout history, women have been held up to the exacting standards of society. These standards, taught to us as young girls and reinforced in a multitude of ways, affect the views that women hold of themselves as they age. From the start of my thirties, I’ve spent so much time questioning who I am and why I see myself in that way. I’ve been told throughout my entire life that there was a certain set of “perfections” I had to uphold to be an ideal woman. Many of those ideas clash with my own, and this fracture of thought is where this exploration began. The Untended Garden is a visual reflection structured in three acts – the expectations of women as informed by society and culture, the transformation that women reach as they break through during their coming of age, and the resolution of self that comes from the acceptance of flaws and the reality of aging. By combining still life and self-portrait photographs with experimental photographic alcohol transfer methods, this project explores multiple facets of the cyclical nature of life in a garden as a metaphor to reflect on the experience of women. At the heart of this work, The Untended Garden is about the universality of transforming identity and gaining the wisdom to see flaws as strengths.
Image by Mara Magyarosi-Laytner
Book review by Dana Stirling |
Mara Magyarosi-Laytner’s The Untended Garden is a deeply evocative exploration of femininity, identity, and the body as a site of reflection and transformation. The book examines the ways in which societal and cultural expectations shape women’s self-perception, tracing the internal and external pressures that inform the experience of womanhood. These expectations, often instilled from a young age, linger and evolve over a lifetime, influencing how women relate to their own bodies and to the notion of perfection. In The Untended Garden, Magyarosi-Laytner confronts these pressures, offering a visual meditation that is both personal and universally resonant.
Central to the power of The Untended Garden is Magyarosi-Laytner’s visual language. By combining self-portraiture and still life with experimental photographic processes, particularly alcohol transfers, she creates imagery that is at once photographic and painterly. The textures, layering, and abstraction of her technique evoke the expressive qualities of contemporary painting while maintaining the intimacy and specificity of photography. Botanicals recur throughout the work—flowers, leaves, and organic forms—not merely as decorative elements, but as potent metaphors for growth, decay, and renewal. These motifs recall the tradition of painting the female figure amid nature, most notably works like Millais’s Ophelia, where flora becomes intertwined with the body to reflect emotional and psychological states. In Magyarosi-Laytner’s work, plants and petals are suspended in abstraction, mirroring the complexity of identity and the fluidity of self-perception, turning natural forms into reflections of interior life.
Image by Mara Magyarosi-Laytner
Her painterly approach situates the work at a compelling intersection in the art world, where the boundaries between photography, painting, and collage are increasingly porous. The images engage with a lineage of contemporary photographers who push the medium beyond representational constraints—yet retain a distinctive voice that is intensely personal and experimental. Magyarosi-Laytner’s photographs evoke the tactile and emotional resonance of painting, drawing viewers into a contemplative space where the body, the botanical, and the abstract converge.
Image by Mara Magyarosi-Laytner
Image by Mara Magyarosi-Laytner
Ultimately, The Untended Garden is a work of introspection and resonance, a fusion of visual experimentation and thoughtful exploration. It challenges viewers to reconsider their own assumptions about femininity, the body, and identity, while demonstrating how photographic abstraction can convey psychological depth. Through its painterly textures, botanical metaphors, and reflective imagery, The Untended Garden stands as both a personal exploration and a significant contribution to contemporary art photography, illuminating the evolving, cyclical journey of selfhood and the enduring beauty of imperfection.
The physical book itself is an extension of Magyarosi-Laytner’s artistic vision. Each image is presented full-bleed, allowing the photographs to envelop the reader from start to finish, creating an immersive and intimate experience. A dominant palette of rose, red, and purple hues permeates the work, lending it a lush, almost otherworldly quality that enhances its painterly abstraction. These colors, warm yet mysterious, underscore the emotional intensity of the images while reinforcing the organic motifs of flora and the body. The tactile experience of turning the pages, combined with the saturated, enveloping imagery, transforms the book into more than a collection of photographs—it becomes a sensorial journey through the artist’s meditation on identity, femininity, and transformation.
Image by Mara Magyarosi-Laytner
