Boy in the Garden
With Boy in the Garden, photographer Scott Bowlby tells his own coming-of-age story. While spending the summer with his family on an island, he started to question and interrogate his queer identity and learned how to love himself.
Photography Scott Bowlby
Boy in the Garden (2019) is a documentation of the comings and goings of the people around me. It’s my version of a coming-of-age story: not necessarily about the trial and triumph of youth, but a subtle breaking away from the restraints made in my youth. The ones that held me back.
While spending the summer at my family’s island in Pointe-au-baril, along the eastern shores of Georgian Bay, I started to question as a queer man how I subconsciously isolated and connected to people around me.
“The island was like a garden, a space simplified and beautiful.”
The island was like a garden, a space simplified and beautiful. It became a microcosm of life, constantly moving, changing, and discovering self-love within the stationary moments… I had to accept myself as I was before I could truly break away from the garden. The garden could only survive because the birds of a feather don’t always need to be stuck together.
My time away opened my eyes to the beauty of separation that makes the time we flock back together so special, rejuvenating the garden. Similarly, as people came and left the island, I had to refine my grounding within myself. It was the people that constantly returned that mattered. No longer questioning, I stopped running away and embrace myself.
“My time away opened my eyes to the beauty of separation that makes the time we flock back together so special.”
About Scott
Scott Bowlby is a Canadian born photographer currently based in London, England. He is currently pursuing his masters in fashion communication at Central Saint Martins. After obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Art in photography at the Parson School of Design in New York City in 2020.
His work is rooted in exploring themes of queer theory, desire, and the male figure as form of landscape, while furthering his own understanding of what masculinity means.
His work takes place in a dark dulled like studio environment allowing him to capture the essence of his subject and transport them into his own world of created from desire.
To see more of his work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram
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