Sebastian Posingis: Salt River

In this book, German photographer Sebastian Posingis (born 1975) photographs the famed Sri Lankan garden of architect Geoffrey Bawa (1919–2003), described by its creator as a “place of many moods, the result of many imaginings.” In 1948, as Ceylon was slipping off the shackles of colonial rule, Bawa, then a young and reluctant lawyer, returned home from a decade of study and travel, and bought an abandoned rubber estate near the town of Bentota. He renamed it “Lunuganga” or “Salt River,” and set out to transform it into a tropical evocation of the great landscape gardens of England and Italy that he had explored during his travels. Fifty years later the garden was in its prime: trees had been felled and new ones planted, hills had been moved, terraces cut, and artworks had been installed. Today the garden survives, miraculously and precariously, and continues to within the pages of this book.