For our third project, we were promoted to represent a space that we like and given the opportunity to print in large format, specifically 44x44 inches. As everyone in Rochester knows, we had a particularly brutal winter this year. One place away from Eastman that has become very special to me is Lamberton Conservatory in Hyland Park. In the dead of winter, it feels so wonderful to step into the warm humid air and soak up the vibrant plant life.
I knew I wanted to play with a few inspirations in this project. 1) I wanted to mimic both the style of the artist I presented on earlier, Karl Blossfeldt, and an artist whose work I have loved for years, Steven N. Meyers. I love that the the work feels elegant and clean to me, highlighting the beautiful forms of the plants.
I thought that this "scientific" aspect of their photography would mirror our printing format, since I associate squares with math and ideals of perfections. This affected how I arranged my photos. I originally had a vision of sm
aller squares framing progressively larger squares which you can see in some of the sketches below. I ended up settling on just resizing the original rectangular format in most photos, but I still I kept them within their rigid frames.
With floral photography, I am most captivated when the flowers look luminous because of how they are backlit. Overall, I was thinking of creating the effect of a mosaic. I spent a lot of time making seams transition so that if you blurred your eyes you might also get a surreal effect.
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