LensCulture Review

These photos are portraits of dying flowers, showing for the viewer each subject’s personality, expressiveness, and mystery. I am reminded of a quote by a Ansel Adams, who said ‘I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful - an endless prospect of magic and wonder.’ Anyone who takes the time to look closely at flowers must agree! These elegant subjects are enticing to the eye – even as they die! The colors and shapes perfectly illustrate the idea of “magic and wonder” in a way that only nature could produce. This group of images uses selective focus and a white background to lure the viewer in, like a bee, toward these delicate subjects, intentionally filling the frame to paint in the frame while emphasizing colors, intricacies, compositional movement and form.

The sense of fluid movement creates aesthetic tensions between the contrasting colors in the photos, especially the white backgrounds that create a sense of translucency in the petals and leaves. The images are very narrative. Each photo tells a story about its subject matter as it withers at the end of its life. Each image is pointing toward a larger narrative that encompasses all the photos.

Flowers don’t cease to be flowers as they reach the end of their life cycle. Hour by hour they become different in their nature and appearance but they are still flowers. These images put the viewer in a dream-like world of compositions where abstract, painterly figures are juxtaposed against bright frames - layered on top of one another in a way that compresses space and removes all context and sense of scale. The compositions become like another world where decaying organic figures merge with the environment and transform to become new compositional structures. As the petals fall and the leaves shrink, the white background consumes their forms.

These observational worlds remove the viewer from their commonly understood vantage points because it’s impossible to know where the photographer’s eye is in relationship to the subjects. This technique takes the viewer into more surreal, magical worlds. Compositionally combining layers of petaled colors and emphasizing luminosity creates compositions that promote feelings of delicacy and gracefulness putting the viewer in a position to speculate what and where it is they are seeing. Because of this, the images evoke ideas around vantage point, perception, and imagination.

Somehow the photos communicate ideas about the nature of this reality and the way it can blend with a mysterious dream reality. In this way there is a sense of silence, softness, and a fluid movement into alternate states of existence - visual ideas and observations that are fascinating. Together, the images tell a story, yet each photo is strong enough to stand on its own.

There are strong visual threads that clearly run through this series and the first one is “color”. They seek to capture the magic and the subtlety that color can communicate. The cool colors speak about the warmth of these character’s life energy as they slowly decay - using color as a transformational, alchemical tool to transmute what the photographer sees into what is experienced by the viewer. Other threads are suggestions of shape and form, sometimes as metaphors for the universe or the human body.

The flowers appear to be organic-graphic elements on the page, prompting the viewer to ask questions about their larger forms. The photos are interesting because they “blur” the line between photography and compositional, poetic, abstract design. These visual abstractions and colors are clearly important characters in the stories these images tell, asking that the viewer be sensitive enough to look deeply at the images, to see the details and to consider the ideas in Ansel Adams’ quote.