We’ve made a little bit of a habit here recently of showcasing the best flower photography and artwork which we can find. If you haven’t been reading our blog in recent weeks (and why not!?), then you can catch up on a few of these entries now! Here is the work of Robert Buelteman, who does amazing things with mad-scientist tricks involving scalpels, silicon, and thousands of volts of electricity.
Then, we dug out yet more amazing flower photography for you, with Hugh Turvey’s magnificent X-Ray flower photos, which you can see here. It’s fascinating how Turvey, focusing on the invisible aspects of the flower, manages to build them a whole new exterior shape, mirroring yet questioning the form that we think of as representational of a flower.
So having started with this fascinating trawl around the world of flower snaps (not that ‘snap’ is the word), let’s continue. Today’s pictures come from the photographer Jonathan Singer, whose great work Botanicus Majesticus is the subject of a new exhibition at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. The images in real life are huge – Jonathan will photograph a flower which is maybe two inches long, and make it into a five-foot-six image, allowing us to see the structure and beauty of tiny flowers from the forest floor in a way which we could never perceive with casual observation.
Singer, who is currently recovering from brain surgery as part of his treatment for Parkinson’s Disease, specialises in photographing rare flowers, in huge-scale photographs which seek to inhabit the overlap between science and art. As curator Karen Reeds says, "You can see things in these flowers that are blown up so enormously, yet are crisp and clear, that you would not be able to see with the naked eye. I, as a historian of botany, have learned a lot about botany from these pictures."
