Artist’s statement
A flower in full bloom seems to hold a moment of perfection. Its form, color and scent reach their peak, yet that moment already contains the prospect of decay. This brief fullness has long offered a way to speak about the most intense experiences of love, desire, success and fear.
We give flowers at births, celebrations and funerals, using them to express feelings that can be difficult to put into words. We also pick flowers in an attempt to possess their beauty. The gesture contains a contradiction: to hold the flower at its most radiant is also to hasten its death. What we wish to preserve begins to fade in our hands.
Photography holds a similar tension. It records a living subject while fixing a moment that has already passed. Roland Barthes understood this close relationship between photography and mortality. Yet death can also be imagined as a threshold of transformation. Many religious traditions understand it as the beginning of another form of life; the resurrection of Jesus is one such image of renewal.
In this series, I explore how photography might give a flower another life. By recording its passage through beauty, withering and death, I seek to preserve a fleeting existence and allow it to appear anew. I photograph the flower from stem to bloom, shaping the frame around its length and form.
I use two approaches: a conventional camera and lighting to describe the flower in detail, and a pinhole camera to reveal it through a different experience of time. Together, they ask how the passing of a life might become the beginning of an image.
