Flora Obscura
When I began with a new season and floral motif, I thought this series would be a light and cheerful one. For over a year, I edited and sorted through the photographs; during this time, I was concurrently beginning to write sections of memoir. As I worked through memories in my writing, the theme in my photography began to evolve from a generic blossoming sweetness to something deeper, more personal. It became about the shift and confusion of memory- its loss and fading, its transformation and warping, its bright fog and dark shadow, its clear glimpses and beautiful nostalgia. All of the strange and beautiful morphs that occur in memory, I saw reflected in these images. They illuminate both a beauty and a vagueness, a nostalgia and an incompletion, a warping and a clarity, an intangibility that cannot quite be grasped.
I’ve divided the series into four sections, each with a nod to the first part of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, which I’ve always loved, and which relates so well with the themes of death and spring rebirth, memory and fear.
A Little Life with Dried Tubers
Breeding Lilacs
Fear in a Handful of Dust
Only There is Shadow
I created this spring variation building from my original Autumn Obscura series. As before, all of the photographs were created at my property in Michigan, and the effects were produced in-camera using various techniques that intentionally stretch the limits of the camera. In the final images, I embrace what might otherwise be recognized as technical flaws-- noise, hotspots, chromatic aberrations, foreground obstructions, and gradient banding. As always, my process of creating is very intuitive, and I must often work through projects for a period of time before understanding what the work is about and how it should be completed. This series was created and completed between 2016-2017.
(For information on purchasing images from this series or for a showing in your gallery or space, please contact Naomi.)
