Still Life: A Photographer’s Journey Through Grief and Gardening by Jane Fulton Alt presents forty-five photographs of a native garden and the flowers and plants that inhabit it. Following the unexpected death of her husband, Howard, Alt assumed responsibility for the nascent ecosystem he had planted in response to his growing concern over climate change. What began as daily stewardship gradually became a source of creative focus and sustenance amid mourning.
“I was never a gardener,” writes Alt, a statement that marks her abrupt turn toward caring for a landscape still in formation and establishes the unfamiliar ground from which the book unfolds. If the garden represents new terrain, the camera remains constant. “A potent combination in adjusting to this new life.” Together, the photographs and accompanying texts form a body of work in which personal loss finds expression through close attention to the living world.
Beyond its autobiographical origin, the book operates across several thematic strands. It engages lived experience, the labor of cultivating native plants where people reside, and the broader consequences of climate change. Alt’s contemplative photography provides a shared visual language through which these concerns intersect as parallel yet connected threads. The accompanying essays extend this dialogue, moving between reflections on loss, ecological thought, and the art history of still life. In doing so, they situate the project within a wider cultural and environmental discourse, where an intimate undertaking acquires collective resonance.
“Our only home is facing two enormous environmental crises: climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Grassroots actions like Howard’s are addressing both simultaneously.” – Douglas Tallamy
Visually, the series moves across three distinct registers. Images of flowers set against a dark ground — tree peonies with sweet cherry, common lilac and a Persian buttercup — draw from the Dutch still-life tradition while avoiding pastiche. Close abstractions such as garden tulips transform the flower into a study of pattern and surface. The garden images remain the most vulnerable and emotionally resonant. Petals crease, dry leaves gather, and stems bend without resolving into perfection, exposing the fragility and temporality that underlie both growth and loss.
In his essay, meditation teacher James Baraz reflects on grief through the discipline of attention. He approaches Alt’s photographs not as attempts at resolution but as practices of remaining present. “In opening ourselves to the pain of our loss and finding constructive ways to express all that we feel, we transform our suffering into compassion and ultimately into a more enduring kind of love.” For Baraz, tending the garden becomes a sustained engagement with sorrow, without denying sadness or forcing consolation.
Ecologist and author Douglas Tallamy places Howard’s initiative within urgent discussions of biodiversity and climate change. He argues that environmental action must occur where people live, not only in protected or remote areas. “The future of conservation lies in landscaping that includes, rather than excludes, nature outside of our parks and preserves,” he writes, positioning native gardens as instruments of ecological change.
In his contribution, collector and curator W. M. Hunt finds echoes of painters such as Martin Johnson Heade, Raphaelle Peale, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Henri Rousseau in Alt’s photographs, praising her knowledge of pictorial tradition. He reads the title as a statement of continuation, not stasis. “Think of the title Still Life as in: there is still life to live.” Hunt emphasizes the role of illumination in the series, suggesting that Alt’s search for light is both perceptual and philosophical. Her patience in the garden and her deep, intense color convey a persistent pursuit of clarity, an effort to see and to feel the world through tenderness instead of despair.
“In Still Life, we witness how sorrow can give birth to beauty and how loss can lead to a deeper connection with life.” – James Baraz
“Alt’s late husband, Howard, is at the center of her story. Theirs was by all accounts a great romance and collaboration, brought to life charmingly in this sweet dance of red ranunculus.” – W. M. Hunt
Jane Fulton Alt was born in Chicago in 1951 and began exploring the visual arts while pursuing a career as a clinical social worker. Her award-winning photography explores the universality of the human condition and the non-material world. Alt received a BA from the University of Michigan and an MA from the University of Chicago. She studied at the Evanston Art Center, as well as at Columbia College and the Art Institute of Chicago. Alt is the author of Look and Leave: Photographs and Stories from New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward (2009) and The Burn (2013). Her portfolio “Crude Awakening” appeared in publications worldwide.
Alt’s work is held in permanent and private collections, including Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sunnhordland Museum, Stord, Norway; Niigata Science Museum, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and New Orleans Museum of Art. Her work is in many special library collections, including Savannah College of Art and Design, UCLA, University of Illinois, University of Vermont, University of Washington, Wesleyan University, and Yale University. She is the recipient of numerous awards and artist residencies.
Alt resides in Evanston, Illinois, and her beloved adopted city, New Orleans.
About the book
Still Life: A Photographer’s Journey through Grief and Gardening
Published by MW Editions (22 April 2026)
Photographs and Foreword by Jane Fulton Alt
Essays by James Baraz, Douglas Tallamy, and W. M. Hunt
Design by Takaaki Matsumoto
Hardbound
104 Pages, 45 color illustrations, 8.5 x 8.5”
ISBN 978-1-969303-00-5
$40.00
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