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I wanted to explore flowers as relatively innocent repositories of beauty. But as I shot these images, the flowers opened, wilted, turned, and otherwise complicated my attempts to capture them. I am most stricken by how we observe flowers with anthropomorphic interest. The swelling bud, the exposed pistils, the gleaming corolla are all biological mechanisms of attraction, and strangely we are moved by the same elegance that moves bees and butterflies and caterpillars. But there’s more to flowers than that. I realize that I close entire worlds out of the frame of these pictures. Flowers know nothing of suffering, beauty that has been befouled or shamed, imprisoned desires, or lives cut off from any chance of success or hope. The simple beauty in these flowers is in fact complex, loaded with our projections about what should be. Our conceptions of beauty are never innocent.
All images are printed on gelatin-silver fiber paper and archivally processed. Available in 11x14 in editions of 25 and 20x24 in editions of 10. List of images: |