Trinity Orchid (September 2021)

Nucleus (June 2021)

Ghost Plant (August 2021)

Three Different Visual Strategies/Responses to the Same Subject: Orchid

These three photographs were made using the same camera, in the same room, utilizing the same subject: my very patient and always willing subject, the plant I lovingly have named Lazarus, after the biblical figure who rose from the dead. Lazarus the Orchid came into my life  three or four years ago. This orchid has returned from what I believed was death, to bloom and flower again, over and over. This re-flowering, this rebirth, always inspires me to observe and celebrate and create a new round of photographs.

The top image is the most visually conventional, on the surface, yet even it is a couple of steps away from a traditional photograph: looking closely, the viewer detects ghostly double images within the frame.

The second image was made with a pinhole "lens", rather than an actual glass lens. The long exposure time, thirty seconds (due to the tiny f162 aperture through which light strikes the sensor), resulted in a bit of softening of the floral detail.

The third and final image is also a pinhole photograph; it varies from the second image due to a sense of overall Dionysian energy and fecundity, almost from a bug's-eye perspective.

 

 

January 2021

 My thought when I first viewed this in-camera, triple-exposure photograph, as it appeared on the viewing screen on the back of my DSLR, was that extremely weird, uncanny sensation that I was gazing at a figure simultaneously orchid and human.