Flowers: A Tragic Ode to Existence & Impermanence

Below is a curated collection of some of my recent macro and garden photography from 2023. This year i was blessed to have picked up a used Laowa 100mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO and i am absolutely smitten with the sharp and soft images that it produces. Although shooting with a manual focus macro lens has come with its own set of additional challenges on top of the struggles of shooting so close to subjects — slight movements alter compositional aspirations, <.1 millimeter can throw the focus, so with wind, moving subjects, and jittery muscles, it is hella hard to capture dope images, but it's so, so very rewarding because the world is soooo big and colorful down there.

This year I’ve been doing a lot of philosophy behind the camera. My artistic practice as a photographer has become increasingly more integral to my philosophical thinking as my dissertation project has continued to develop, I have begun to more intentionally incorporate photography into the project as philosophical method. More than just geographic location, physical place is extremely central to the ways that people and communities make social meaning out of their personal and shared lived experiences. For abolitionists, communal meeting spaces (oftentimes criminalized), geographies of fugitivity, and sites of militant contestation all bear tremendous importance and spiritual residue or spirit of place, or what Hoodoo Sen Moise conceptualizes as “something that holds potent power, based on a physical location.” This notion of spirit of place is also interpreted by theorists of ecowomanism through the concept of eco-memory, which “refers to the collective and individual memory of the earth and speaks to our continuing relationship with the planet.” (Harris 2019) For Blackamerikans, these collective and individual eco-memories are often violently tainted with blood. From the blood tainted shores of Africa and the sea floor adorned with the skeletons murdered by the Middle Passage, the plantation soils stolen from Indigenous populations by genocidal Europeans where Black people toiled as chattel to the surviving trees who remember and bear witness to the horrors of lynchings from their limbs turned gallows to the concrete urban jungles riddled with bullet holes and decay, the bloody residue of the ongoing historical trauma of anti-Blackness is imprinted and embedded in the spaces that we move through. 

In this respect, photography of the cultural remnants that sustain and/or rupture a spirit of place can provide an important methodological tool to capture the spirit of the  ghostly memory of place that  Jacques Derrida conceptualized as of hauntological. In On Photography, Susan Sontag offered a philosophical challenge of the “realism” that photographic images are generally understood to represent. In Sontag’s view, both the product of the photographic image and the producer’s  phenomenological experience of the producer of the photographic image are necessarily hauntological.  For Sontag,  on the one hand, not only do “photographs furnish evidence,” and pass “for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture,” but, on the other hand, “Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.

Photography is necromancy magic; to “capture” a picture is to create a ghost. A practice of seeing and be scene. Conjuring an imaginary portrayal of something that is, as it once was (or at least might have been), from the light that will never be again, is nothing short of miracle work. Perhaps at their best, photographic images are evocative spectres that elicit the socio-emotional response required to prolong the spiritual memory and ghastly residue subject through shackling it in shadow and light through the lens and at the will of the conjurers intent, perspective, and mood. Importantly, through the act of photography, as a witness to the world and their own existence, the conjurer creates through capture as a means of asserting good news to the world, “i am and/because We are.”

i came to appreciate how flowers have come to make me think different about matters of life and death. One day, along a long post-rain summer afternoon walking journey to study some lilies, some wee folk ran up on me and asked me why I was photographing the flowers. I knew that i loved spending time with flowers, but I had never really had voiced internally or to anyone else why i loved them; at the time i don’t think i really knew. So I just kind of blurted out mid-thought, “uh, well i really love how colorful they; how unique, different, and beautifully diverse they all are on each of their plants; and how they made me appreciate life.

After i sat with a few Vincent van Gogh paintings in gallery exhibits over the winter, i had been eagerly wanting/waiting to curate a van Gogh-inspired irises collection to reflect upon and say something about the splendor and madness of [being in] the world. Sometimes i just gotta go outside and sit with the beauty of the world and find peace in knowing that the planet will survive this iteration of epochal apocalypse. After a lot of wandering and studying bearded, beardless, crested, dwarf, miniature, standard, and all sorts of different irises, i gotta say, i really get the appeal. extraordinarily excited to playing with and studying the #iris more, but here are a few sets of stills from my wanderings. Studying irises intentionally this year really gave me a deep appreciation of not only the myriad color variations, but also the amount of species within specific genres of flowers. some are short, some are tall, some are plump. but even on specific plants, each flower is unique af.

So when the youngins asked to see the last photo i took, i showed them the image with the orange lilies in the foreground with the yellow lily in focus in the frame. i told them that i often catch myself thinking they're so beautiful is because of how short-lived their beauty is from our perspective; sometimes quite literally — here today, gone tomorrow. i often wonder about how important angiosperms are for the conditions of possibility for mammalian existence and think about all of the beautiful individual flowers that have ever brightened and fed the world that I never got to experience.

They collectively said "wowwww" and proceeded to put their little faces up to the flowers and tell me which were their favorites. it was such a precious interaction, and I'm glad I have some sacred photos to memorialize the moment. Anyway, here are some of my recent sights; i do hope you enjoy. if you can, go enjoy some flowers, think, and pursue a lifegiving death.

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