Am I Becoming a 'Flower' Photographer?

If so I’ll be on my knees tonight pleading for mercy. Okay, I jest. Oh, don’t tell me that God doesn’t have a sense of humor. Just take a look around at all your best friends and try to say that again with a straight face.

But mostly I will need to be asking forgiveness from a lot of friends.

I marvel, for the mumpteenth-dozen time, at what in a photograph resonates or why a photograph resonates. It’s a very baffling. It’s like art, you just know it when you see it. The unfortunate is that is it as difficult to repeat, for me anyway, as it is to achieve.

I seem to be going off in all directions at once and can’t seem to stay on any one path. Recently, for a while I was into freaky toys, then I shifted to birds and the beach. And now Alcy is bringing flowers to the studio on her next off day, so yesterday I picked up an eighteen inch section of red painted bamboo from a Goodwill store for a couple of bucks. I wanted to use it as a temporary container for the flower photographs. Also picked up a couple of papers from Artarama that I thought might work as background. To test it out, I stopped at a couple of places to check out flowers but didn’t find anything that I thought would work with the bamboo so I settled for a silk flower that Alcy had left at the studio.

I know it actually doesn’t ‘work’ photographically because it is an artificial flower, Captain Kangroo no no for an acceptable ‘photograph’,  and the fact that the focus is on the background paper rather than the blossom—that part is bad. But I really like the design, the ambiance, the feel of the image. I might say that it strikes an aesthetic cord that feels good--resonates. Like a lot of the stuff I do it is an ‘image’—not inclined to call it a photograph because it is not the photographic quality that resonates—it is the graphic that I enjoy. Okay, it looks like wallpaper but what is wrong with wallpaper. Who is to say that a wallpaper designer—they are designed you know—is not as much of an artist as a painter or sculptor? Sure needs stronger staying power when you hang it all over your dining room.

The question is, can I repeat it later with a real flower? Probably not but I think that I am going to try.