Pictures + Text

Wesley Verhhoeve continues to share his process for making a photo book, step-by-step, in real time. His post today, When Do Pictures Need Words?, is a huge help to me as I make my photo book, Florilegium.

By and large, I do not feel that my Florilegium photo book requires words. The book is a visual experience where readers are invited to see flowers as I see them. Captions would be clunky. Naming flowers would turn the book into a study of botany. Describing my visits to flower farms would be more in line with documentary work. But I do think that a few words to help set the context, a preface, might be a positive addition to the book. This would be akin to a project or artist’s statement. I also love the idea of including poetry, a considered quote, or a thoughtful essay. But I’m still working on these ideas and holding them back for the book.

Learning a Little at a Time

 

What I have done already counts.

The thousands of pictures, the classes, and the hours of practice.

The books I have read and the books I have made.

The crappy work and the truly extraordinary work.

The versions of myself that have shown up and grown up.

I can be happy with what I have already done AND still be restless for more.

Contentment and ambition can live alongside each other in relative balance.

Now I wonder, how far can I go with this?

What else can I learn?

Can I move beyond perfectionism toward more authentic, personal moments?

Lost Gardens

I try to research and locate flower farms near our home, but often, flowers are grown in very unofficial ways that do not involve websites and advertising. As we drove through King George County on our way to visit George Washington’s birthplace, Wakefield at Pope’s Creek, I spied this sign for a flower farm on Route 3. Things looked promising. The American flag danced in the summer breeze, and a sign across the highway read “open,” so we pulled in. But as we roamed the property, it was clear, the farm had closed up. The grounds were still mowed and there were flowers lingering—rose and hydrangea bushes, gladiolus, and a large fig tree with so many bees attending the fruit that the tree literally hummed. But there were no flowers to pick, no person to pay. Things change and businesses come and go, but there are always remnants of sweeter days before the farm was lost.

From Below

“Part of what gives a flower such charge is that, even as we plunge our face into its blowsy petals, 
and enjoy its heady scent, we know that tomorrow it may have turned.”
—Lucy Davies, New Photography of the Flower.

The anemones are from my own flower garden, the patch that runs alongside the sidewalk to our home. The zinnias are from the flower farm at Garner’s Produce in Warsaw, Virginia. Both photos were taken on this hot and sunny August day. Both photos also required that I lie on my back and shoot pictures from ground level, up into the sky. The zinnias were taken mid-morning when the skies were blue with puffy clouds, and I had to aim at an angle because I only had my 85mm lens with me. I also had to lie down in the garden dirt. The anemone photo was taken in early evening as the sun faded—no clouds, just the rim of the oak trees in our yard. Because I had a comfy quilt to lie upon, I was able to aim pretty much directly overhead into the sky.

My hip hurts a bit from all the getting down and back up again, over and over. I’ve used my foam roller to reset my body and scheduled a day of rest for tomorrow. Still, I feel good for the effort and happy with the pictures made from below, looking up to the underside of the flowers.