In everyday life, we always see flowers and plants in color, but I have always found a special kind of beauty in black and white. In my first decade as a photographer, I always worked with film, and only knew how to print in the darkroom with black and white, so that’s how I naturally began to see the world around me. This series helped me begin to find my voice as an abstract artist, as I fell in love with the geometry, lines, and rhythms of the natural world.
The more I photographed flowers and plants, the more I began to experiment. I began to develop my hallmark style of zooming in on small parts, which allows an entire new universe to unfold. Sometimes I would turn a flower around to photograph it from the back, and sometimes circumstances led me to use alternative processes. When I photographed a red dahlia with white tipped petals, I tried printing it in black and white, resulting in the vivid explosion of my “Genesis” photograph.
I am drawn to images that carry a certain meditative quality. Part of this is achieved by using a sparse language of geometrical shapes, lines, and rhythms. Furthermore, I often use a narrow tonal range, so that the images are either overall dark or overall light. Sometimes I use alternative processes, as when I created “Genesis” by cross-printing a color slide on black-and-white paper, which transformed the white and red dahlia into a black and white explosion of energy.
By abstracting away from the literal subject matter, I hope to leave behind the question “What is it?”, and let our associations to come to the forefront. My goal is for the photographs to have a feeling of meditative simplicity, so they are images not from our everyday, mundane world of hustle and bustle, but instead from the more symbolic and archetypal world of our imagination.
All photographs are archival pigment prints, on the highly-textured Hahnemuehle William Turner paper. Prints are available at 12” x 12”, 20” x 20”, 40” x 40”, and 58” x 58”.
In everyday life, we always see flowers and plants in color, but I have always found a special kind of beauty in black and white. In my first decade as a photographer, I always worked with film, and only knew how to print in the darkroom with black and white, so that’s how I naturally began to see the world around me. This series helped me begin to find my voice as an abstract artist, as I fell in love with the geometry, lines, and rhythms of the natural world.
The more I photographed flowers and plants, the more I began to experiment. I began to develop my hallmark style of zooming in on small parts, which allows an entire new universe to unfold. Sometimes I would turn a flower around to photograph it from the back, and sometimes circumstances led me to use alternative processes. When I photographed a red dahlia with white tipped petals, I tried printing it in black and white, resulting in the vivid explosion of my “Genesis” photograph.
I am drawn to images that carry a certain meditative quality. Part of this is achieved by using a sparse language of geometrical shapes, lines, and rhythms. Furthermore, I often use a narrow tonal range, so that the images are either overall dark or overall light. Sometimes I use alternative processes, as when I created “Genesis” by cross-printing a color slide on black-and-white paper, which transformed the white and red dahlia into a black and white explosion of energy.
By abstracting away from the literal subject matter, I hope to leave behind the question “What is it?”, and let our associations to come to the forefront. My goal is for the photographs to have a feeling of meditative simplicity, so they are images not from our everyday, mundane world of hustle and bustle, but instead from the more symbolic and archetypal world of our imagination.
All photographs are archival pigment prints, on the highly-textured Hahnemuehle William Turner paper. Prints are available at 12” x 12”, 20” x 20”, 40” x 40”, and 58” x 58”.
