Honest and Vulnerable

We love flowers so much we kill them. 
—Hannah Kozak

As I continue to work my way through this project, a gathering of floral portraits, I read and study from different perspectives. I enjoyed a video from FRAMES today; Tomasz Trzebiatowski shares his conversation with photographer Hannah Kozak. Her work is deeply moving. I could relate to parts of her story as she told of how she visited her mother in a nursing home, witnessing her life ebb. Photography was integral in the process of healing her relationship with her mother.

I was bringing my mother flowers every time I went to visit her. And then a few days later, the flowers would start to die, right? And I couldn't bear to just throw them out. So, I would take the flowers from the nursing home and bring them home. I set them up in a vase in the same room.

Hannah made photographs of those flowers from her mother’s room, using Kodak Portra 400 film and her Rolleiflex camera. She printed the pictures as 10x10 squares, intimate and vulnerable, in her project, We Love Flowers So Much We Kill Them.

It’s not easy to be honest and vulnerable. And it’s even harder to find a safe space to share those feelings. When words fail me, I make pictures and hope the viewer can feel my love. It’s hard to love something or someone if you are judging it . . . and this is what I try to do in this space . . . let go of judgment.


Say it with Flowers

“Beauty is, no doubt, the most spontaneous and most widespread relationship we have with flowers. We find them so beautiful, so pleasing to the eye that they have entered our daily lives in many different ways. We give them as signs of thoughtfulness, gratitude, or love. We welcome them into our homes, onto our tables, wallpaper, and drapes. We choose them to adorn our bodies, clothes, and skin, and wear them in the form of jewelry. We want them near us, in our flowerpots and gardens, on our screensavers and wall decorations. We make the effort to travel to see them painted by artists. Flowering plants, or angiosperms, are the plant family that most inhabits our imaginations and dreams. To all appearances, we love flowers.”

—Estelle Zhong Mengual, Botanical

Kinfolk Inspired

A photograph works because your eye knows where to land first. Then it discovers everything else. The image unfolds. It doesn’t introduce itself all at once.

—Colin King, The Last Layer

More constraints for my current project. Distinct characteristics of the photographs for my florelegium project.

  • Subject Matter: flowers from local flower farms

  • Natural Lighting: directional daylight

  • Soft color palettes: soft whites, earthy neutral tones, desaturated colors/pastels

  • Minimalist composition: negative space, clean lines, uncluttered backgrounds to draw focus to the flowers themselves as subjects

  • Film-like processing: grain and texture

  • Art Direction: handcrafted, vintage, secondhand vases and supporting elements with genuine personality; relaxed, authentic, unforced

  • When I am creating, I always have this Bauhaus sentence in my mind: Make it simple but significant.