Flowers are powerful means of conveying emotion: condolences, loss, love, apology, friendship, thanks. Among the flowers commonly given, roses occupy a particularly important place, especially to express love. Yet, roses die quickly. Cut from the bush, placed in a vase full of fresh water, they last only a few days before petals brown and fall all over the table and the rose bud itself droops and becomes sad. A metaphor, perhaps, of the fleeting and fragile nature of romance.
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Genetically modified and homogenized, grown in carefully controlled environments, today’s roses lack the variation, hardiness, and rich aromas of older varietals. 1867 and the tea rose. Today’s roses are standardized, like so many things in our world, even the ways we express our emotions.
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And yet, if we look close enough, we can find variation and differences even in today’s roses, the shapes of the pedals, the colors of the stems, the peculiar way each flower decays. These two photos are form part of a pamphlet in a series of pamphlets on flowers, a sort of paper menagerie.
The value, for me, in coming back again and again to similar subjects is finding what I do and do not like. Maybe in the process I improve my technique, but that’s less interesting to me than watching how my aesthetic sensibilities shift. I seem regularly to return to flowers.
Karl Ove Knausgård is suspicious of photographs, or any art really, that he likes for primarily aesthetic reasons. A profound Protestantism, he thinks, rejects anything that comes too easily, that doesn’t require effort and work. He worries that he must contemplate a photograph in order to discern its meaning and therefore its significance. Only such photographs that demand such reflection and analysis can be art. This assumption, whether explicitly linked to Protestantism or not, seems common amongst both photographers and people who talk about photography (and also seems to justify, at least in part, the ubiquitous “artist’s statement”). To be art, a photograph must contain but conceal some aspect of the photographer’s identity or philosophy. Often, photographs are mechanisms of self realization and self expression. They must have a real intention.
Today, amongst real photographers and connoisseurs of photography, few compliments are more damning than “beautiful.” Art, it seems, is not beautiful or even pretty, but is meaningful and revelatory. Art demands that we acquire the knowledge to appreciate it as art. Pretty pictures are dismissed as “calendar” or “hotel” art.
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I find such an approach limiting and elitist. I am perfectly happy for some creative expression (art?) to have layers of meaning that the sufficiently prepared viewer can disentangle and appreciate. But I am unwilling to imply that only such creative expressions are art. Insofar as I care about other people seeing my work, I would rather thousands of hotel guests looked at one of my photographs as they walked through a lobby than a handful of visitors pondered one while they stood in a gallery. This photograph has no deeper meaning. It is merely a photograph of a flower that somebody found visually pleasing enough to hang in an office. That’s good enough for me.
I continue to be inspired by Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers. The quiet puttering around as I set up and move lights is a pleasure. The way the process encourages me to study the flowers and to see things I would otherwise miss. It’s quiet and contemplative in an otherwise noisy world.
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Anyway, I’ve updated the Two Photos page with two new photographs of flowers, tulips this time.
“Flowers are too easy,” a friend cautioned when I mentioned my fascination with taking pictures of flowers. Apparently, anybody and everybody shoots flowers. I noted that Robert Mapplethorpe’s Flora was a beautiful meditation on flowers, reveling in their diversity and the many ways they can be arranged and lit. He seemed surprised that such a famous photographer would spend so much time photographing flowers.
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I find Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers infinitely inspiring, as I do Josef Sudek’s The Window of My Studio. In both cases the photographer explores all the ways light and shadow play shape form and line and contours, while using only a very limited subject. I find the exercise at once meditative and challenging. When successful, I also find the photographs beautiful.
Sometimes, for me, it is enough that a photograph is just what it purports to be. It doesn’t conceal some meaning or tell a story, doesn’t point to the photographer’s social agenda, and doesn’t reveal the photographer’s psychological anguish. It isn’t reportage or social commentary or documentary photography.
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This, e.g., is a photograph of a flower. Just a flower.
Recently I heard a comment attributed to Todd Rundgren about the direct relationship between effort and value.1 Something to the effect: “Effort increases value.” The people talking understood Rundgren’s point to be: the harder you work at making a [piece of art] and the more effectively you convey that effort to the audience, the more valuable the [piece of art]. Some version of that opinion seems rather common lately. See, for example:
Landscape photographers regularly draw attention to how hard they work trudging through mud and rain, dragging gear up mountains and down valleys, usually before dawn, to find the perfect spot to take a photo of tree or a vista or the sea receding or a lone building or a mountain just as the sun broke through a cloud-covered sky.
Street photographers point out that they work incredibly hard scouting the right scene, waiting for just the right unique combination of light and a passersby to arrest some moment that will likely never happen again, or how they spend nights haunting the city streets for scenes the rest of us will never see (except in their photos).
Film photographers talk about the challenges of shooting film, how they have to meter the scene, how they have to account for reciprocity failure or for bellows extension, how the process forces them to “slow down,” the challenges of digitizing their negatives, the vagaries of scanning techniques.
Any “behind the scenes” video.
While these examples are drawn from photography, I could collect them from most other arts (e.g., writing, painting, woodworking, baking, knitting, sandcastle building). I confess: I don’t see how knowing all this background context contributes to the value of a photograph (or any piece of art). For me, knowing the labor invested in producing a photograph has no effect on its aesthetic quality (or lack thereof). Perhaps I will appreciate or understand the photograph in a different way knowing the calories burnt or miles trekked or hours spent searching for that decisive moment, but I doubt that understanding will make like a photograph that I initially disliked, or make me dislike a photograph I had previously liked. In the end, the photograph is either aesthetically pleasing or not, visually compelling or not.
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Thinking more about the comment attributed to Rundgren: what if he wasn’t saying anything about audiences but was, instead, saying something about makers. If approached that way, Rundgren’s comment contains a degree of truth but is not particularly new. I expect someone who is passionate about a particular endeavor to spend loads of time and effort doing it, more time and effort than people who are not passionate about it. That passion and effort will, I suspect, lead to making better art, excelling at some sport, crafting better tables, grilling better burgers, whatever. I’m not sure what Rundgren meant by “value” (and not even sure that he said it — I couldn’t be bothered to look it up), but maybe we can understand him to mean something like: If you work really, really hard, and do so with intentionality, you will get better at something. Then whatever you produce will be more valuable because it more fully embodies your intentions and goals. But that form of value is first and foremost a value to the artist (or athlete or woodworker or chef or whatever). Any value that an audience invests in the product (art, performance, burger, etc.) is secondary and a different type of value.
I am not going to point out where I heard this comment for a few reasons: I generally like and appreciate the people having the conversation, they are thoughtful and considerate; I was largely eaves dropping on their conversation and so couldn’t ask for clarification — for all I know, given a few minutes they might have modified their opinion; I am using their comment as an opportunity to reflect on the common practice these days of elevating the labor involved in producing a photograph. ↩
Robert Mapplethorpe Flora is a lovely book that highlights the subtle and varied beauty of flowers. And while we can read all sorts of meaning into his photos, meaning most often it seems shaped by what somebody thinks of Mapplethorpe the photographer, in the end they are just beautiful photographs.
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I don’t think every photograph has to tell a story or reveal the inner psychological states of the photographer. Sometimes all I want to do is look at a pretty photograph.
Everybody takes photos of flowers. Snapshots. Artsy black-and-whites. Bold colors against dark backgrounds. Everybody. They are a photographic cliché, though I confess I don’t know quite what the original meaning or significance was in taking photos of flowers and so I don’t know what the practice has lost. I suspect part of the draw is: flowers are dependable subjects. They are easy to find. They don’t move. They can be arranged as you please.
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Some photographers are able to transform ordinary flowers (and vegetables and fruits) into sensual images, e.g., Weston or Mapplethorpe.
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For me photographing flowers combines the pleasures of working quietly and methodically. I enjoy the slow, deliberative process. I also learn a lot about light and how to get the light to illuminate the flower in different ways. But I will freely admit: I also enjoy the photographs. I think they can be beautiful: the elegant shapes and curves, the rich, subtle tones. Photographs don’t always have to tell a story or make a point or reveal some philosophical truth. Sometimes, it is enough for a photograph just to be pretty.
When I started this Daily Photography Project I committed to taking one still life photograph each day. Nothing too elaborate, no lovely basket of fruit spilling across an opulent tablecloth, or pile of exotic flowers and fine bone china. For my goal was not composition. Instead, I had pragmatic and instrumentalist goals: to become better at using my flashes and better at understanding how to light something simple. The variable was the lighting, not the subject.
Now for nearly four weeks I have been taking photos of glasses, usually filled with some liquid, and the occasional flower. But just taking 30 photos without pausing to think about them seems unlikely to help me improve, except by chance. So I’ve spent some time looking at the photos and thinking about how they did or did not capture what I had in mind, and how much and what sort of work I had to do to get them close to what I imagined.
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I’ve learned some things, and become aware of others. I have a new appreciation for and awareness of how shiny surfaces reflect light from other light surfaces. I think now about how a flash (or any light source) will reflect on certain surfaces and not others:
How many times have I had to adjust slightly the flash so it doesn’t overexpose the close side of a glass? Or how many times have I had to put up a dark book or some other object to block the light from spilling back from the far wall, which happens to be white and therefore rather bright?
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I have a better sense of how shadows fall depending on how near or far the light source is from the object, and how large or small that light source. Want a hard, distinct shadow line? Take off the softbox and move the flash a bit further away. Smooth shadows? Softbox and close flash.
I haven’t discovered any insights. What I have become familiar with these lessons to the point that I can now produce the effect I want without going through a series of trials and errors. Insofar as I wanted to learn something about flashes, this exercise has been useful.
However, I have largely disliked this project. I find it dull. I have fallen into the habit of thinking that making the single photograph (which I do each evening) is sufficient. As long as I do that, I’ve accomplished something for the day. Consequently, I find myself taking fewer photographs as I wander with my camera. As if I’ve replaced taking photos of the world around me with taking my daily flash photo.
I appreciate that other people might find these daily projects useful and generative. But I don’t, at least not in a particularly fulfilling way. Useful? Maybe for acquiring a particular skill. Generative? No. Maybe I need to think about the project differently. Maybe by imposing greater constraints, e.g., a photo each day of the same half-filled glass. Michael Beirut who popularized the 100-day project reportedly drew his left hand every day for 100 days. Or more open, e.g., commit to taking a photo each day that captures the sense of some word I’ve chosen for that day (Day 1: Green; Day 2: Anger; Day 3: Wealth; etc.).
In the end, for me, I worry all these parameters will encourage me to produce quantity without encouraging quality or creativity or imagination or questions.
