A family living under a flyover next to a swamp. A colour palette dominated by murky greys and dusty browns. Foliage that consists of barren brambles, rambling ivy and mutilated trees. These are the ingredients that make up Alessandro Imbriaco's forthcoming book, The Garden - the culmination of a body of work based around the margins of Rome, which won the prestigious European Publishers Award 2012.

"In Rome we have an immigration problem," says Imbriaco. "People come here in search of a job, a home and a better life, but when they get here they find that life is not as they expected and are disappointed. There are no jobs, no houses and no better life for them. Five years ago, I started photographing people who needed a place to live due to Rome's housing problems. I tried to show the temporary houses and shelters that were being built around the city in places that were not city and not country."

The result of this work was Temporary Autonomous Zone, a project that showed the creation of informal communities outside the control of the official Rome - the Rome as imagined by town planners and tourist officials. Showing us the housing put up on the edges of the city, Imbriaco creates a kind of psycho-geographic photography that gives a new vision of what the city is and who its inhabitants are. Power, it seems, is what you see. 

Though The Garden is set in Rome, the book's theme has a universal feel that goes beyond the Eternal City. According to Dewi Lewis, programme leader of this year's European Publishers Award, having a broad appeal is an essential element in selecting a winner. "The Garden doesn't feel like it has a national location," he explains. "It doesn't feel like it's in Italy or Rome. It goes beyond national boundaries. 

"The Garden also emerges from his earlier work, but he treats it in a different way, so it's a progression. Everyone's looking around the book to see where this guy comes from. It helps us to understand the work, and we can also see how fresh it is."

If Temporary Autonomous Zone is where Imbriaco is coming from, he is going off the grid with The Garden, with pictures of a swamp he discovered on his many wanderings. "The swamp is very close to one of the main roads out of Rome - a road I drove along almost every day," he says. "Every time I drove along it, I looked over to my right and saw this swamp - an empty natural place that looked out of place. 

The Garden © Alessandro Imbriaco.

The Garden © Alessandro Imbriaco.

"There are a lot of birds and wildlife, so much so that the municipality tried to make it a nature reserve to protect the environment. But this didn't happen and instead people moved into the area. So one day I went to the swamp and walked around, seeing what I could find. Then I met Piero. He said hello and that's how it started. For a month I went to the swamp and photographed the landscape."

Mapping the swale

Imbriaco's photographic influences were initially documentary, but he also had a focus on urban development, town planning and land use. "At the beginning of the whole project I was much more influenced by a documentary approach, like the Farm Security Administration work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others. I was interested in describing a reality that surrounded me every day, but that in the same time was hidden, that nobody talked about.

"After the Second World War, Rome had an intense urban development that changed its nature - a process without a clear plan, often supported by illegal constructions. In Italian we have this word - abusivismo - that can't be translated into English because it's a concept that does not belong to legal societies. [Abusivismo is an illegal practice, based on widespread building code violations resulting from building without planning permission.] The consequence of this irregular development is the existence of great natural interstitial territories that continue until the city centre. In these places that are hidden and safe and free, people who can't afford to pay rent can find shelter."

The informal urban landscape is one that has a great history in photography. Back in the 1910s, Eugene Atget photographed the area outside the old walls of Paris, for example - the area called the Zone. This was a 250m defensive buffer of land where construction was forbidden but, just as in Imbriaco's Rome, it became land for the poor. Ragpickers built houses and shelters to form communities that lay beyond the metropolitan Parisian pale. The land was described as "terrain vague", a space where the urban, the rural, the developed and the unplanned all met. 

The Garden © Alessandro Imbriaco.

The Garden © Alessandro Imbriaco.

In the UK, Marion Shoard described a similar kind of space as Edgelands, land she calls in her essay of the same name "unplanned, certainly uncelebrated and largely incomprehensible territory, where town and country meet". 

Imbriaco's swamp is also an example of what Gilles Clement calls the Third Landscape - areas uncontrolled and unexploited by man, places where random biodiversity holds sway, places essential to the overall health of the planet as a whole, and urban conurbations in particular, for the environmental benefits they bring. Imbriaco shows us the layers of foliage in the swamp, trees reaching up above undifferentiated masses of undergrowth as residential tower blocks rise up in the background. A path disappears into a mess of branches and leaves, a powerline stretches across a primordial foreground of ivy-covered tree trunks rising over a fern-covered swamp floor. 

Family background

However, it's the family living in the swamp who elevate the project, with the very notion of a swamp impacting how you imagine the story. Squalor rubs up against romanticism, in a place we associate with danger, disease and filth. "Piero is from Sicily," says Imbriaco. "He used to sell fruit on the street but then had problems with his family - his wife left him for another man - so he moved to Rome. That was 12 years ago. When he got here he was grief-stricken and became homeless - he lived on the street. Seven years ago he met a Russian woman called Lupa and she became pregnant with Angela. Then they found the site under the flyover and Piero built a shelter." 

"With Temporary Autonomous Zone I had more of a documentary approach, but with The Garden the relationship with the family is stronger. Maybe in this project I wanted to put something of the feeling of Piero and the swamp into the story, something connected to me and my emotional response to the place. This response is that the swamp is something between a natural environment, a site of magic, and a place where life is very hard."

Imbriaco's presentation of the family is fed through Piero, who he got to know well and who remains a friend. However, Imbriaco and Lupa didn't get on, so Lupa remains a closed book to him. As a result, Piero is the dominant inhabitant of the swamp, the one who says that the sound of the car on the flyover is like the sound of the waves in the sea, and a man for whom romanticising the landscape is a viable survival mechanism. Lupa, one feels, has a very different perspective on her home, while Angela is stuck in the middle. 

The focus on the family, the feeling of the project as a book, and the magical element, were all picked up by the jury of the Publishers Award. "The winner has to feel complete as a book," says Lewis. "And The Garden feels complete as a book. Also, the project as a subject is very interesting: three people living under a flyover in a swamp. The way he photographs it is also interesting: it's dark and heavy - the Garden of Eden without sunlight, an Eden that is heavy and oppressive. It's not a big book, but it does feel complete." 

The Garden © Alessandro Imbriaco.

This magical Edenic element is most apparent in the picture of Piero bathing in a stream. The stream is shallow but fast-running, surrounded on all sides by greenery and trees. Piero's clothes lie draped on tree boughs in the foreground as Piero stands naked in the stream. He has a beard and is bent over like some kind of giant faun, his body strong, statuesque and glowing in the diminishing light of dusk. Another picture shows Angela nestling in a tree. She is dwarfed by the three trunks that cradle her, her eyes closed in the permanent twilight that inhabits the photographs throughout the book. 

Still another catches her relationship with her immediate surroundings in a portrait in which she stands against grey-green foliage wearing a crown of fluffy thistle seeds. Angela is small but independent, and somewhat distrustful of the camera; a beautiful country creature, fully aware of this intruder who has entered into her space. If Piero is a pagan Adam, then Angela is his child, a child of a Roman forest. If Lupa is Eve, she's an Eve who already has knowledge - knowledge enough to want out of Piero's Eden.

Despite all the romanticism, Imbriaco recognises the hardships of life in the swamp. "Daily life in the swamp is not easy; you don't have electricity and drinkable water," he says. "When you live in those conditions, it also means your life is much more influenced by external elements such as the weather, because you don't have any artificial means to protect yourself, and you don't have a house that separates you from the environment. So, if it's cold you are cold, and if it's hot you suffer for it."

So we see the rough shelter where the family live. Piero tends a fire against the flyover walls with the random furniture of the al fresco kitchen on his left, including a table, a couple of chairs, a few old motors and a saw and pan hanging on the flyover wall. The floor is made up of grey cinders, a cocktail of ash, tarmac and twigs. Another picture shows the staples of Piero and Lupa's kitchen - dried milk, coffee, sugar, spices and a pineapple with a tag that somehow seems out of place in this most simple of larders.

If the kitchen is a picture of a family, then so is the posed portrait of Piero, Angela and Lupa standing together. Lupa has made herself up for the picture with full make-up and well-coiffed hair. She is holding Angela's shoulders while Piero stands to one side, his hands resting on a stout stick. A typical group portrait in many ways, it shows a family living in most unusual circumstances.

Life on the periphery

More dissonance comes through a picture of Angela looking up at the road above her. She's dressed in a long shirt, plastic bowls for bathing are to one side and there her gaze points to the disconnection between Angela's life in the woods that stand behind her and that of the city passing over her head day and night.

"When you live like this, you are isolated from the rest of the city," says Imbriaco. "Your life is totally different from other people's, and this gives you a sense of alienation and marginalisation. Just think, when Angela had to go school [which means when she had to be included into society], she was forced to move to another place, distant from her father. Lupa and Angela moved into a hostel for mothers and children; she can stay there for two years. It's good because now Angela has started school, but it also means she doesn't see her father as much." So now Piero is alone in the swamp.

The Garden © Alessandro Imbriaco.

"Angela grew up under a bridge, her parents don't have work and they are always exposed to the elements. But at the same time Angela grew up like a child of 60 years ago, a child with a connection to nature. For this reason, she is very strong. I remember one time, when I was with her in the swamp, I asked her what she did when she had a headache. She told me to wait, went under a tree, peeled off some bark and said, ‘When I have a headache I take some off this, boil it in water, let it cool, then drink it. Then the headache goes.' Life is very hard, but at the same time Angela has this closeness to the world around her that few children or adults have."

No compromise

The colour palette of the book emphasises this nostalgia for a natural childhood, but initially it came about by accident rather than by design. "The colours are muted because I photographed at twilight," says Imbriaco. "At first it wasn't a conscious thing. Then, as I photographed more, I realised these were the colours I wanted. The grey represents my relationship to the place. It also gives the swamp a sense of the fairytale." 

With the project complete, Imbriaco set about trying to make a book - submitting a work in book form is a necessary condition for all European Publishers Award entries. "You see a lot of projects where you think ‘this is an interesting photographer' but it doesn't feel like a book," says Dewi Lewis. "Then you get projects that follow a common theme - a few years ago we had a glut of books on Eastern Europe, then there were a lot on China. Now things are very mixed."

For the jury of the European Publishers Award, that mix began with 300 entries and ended with a shortlist of six. By the end of the judges' discussions, only two or three books were under serious consideration, and Imbriaco was the clear winner because he edited his work with an attention to visual detail. At the same time it remained fresh, with a feeling of completion and integrity, and an appeal that reached out to both the southern and northern European publishers. Imbriaco's clarity and passion are unmistakable and helped tip the balance in his favour. "During the project, I knew I wanted to make a book, so I took a month out to design and make a maquette - a dummy," he says. "I fell in love with that maquette and wanted nothing to change. 

"I got proposals from other editors, but they all wanted to change the sequencing and the edit, which is not what I wanted. So when I won the prize I was both happy and scared. I was happy because it's an important prize, but scared in case the publishers wanted to change anything. But it turns out they didn't. The book will run almost as I want it to - and that makes me happy."

In print

Alessandro Imbriaco's The Garden is published in the UK by Dewi Lewis Publishing. It retails at £30 / $48. For more details, visit www.dewilewispublishing.com.