Mad With Joy!

Portraits of Flowers by Glenn A. Osborn

"Mad with joy"—that's a great way to characterize how many people feel about flowers. And Murdoch's speculation about an extra-planetary visitor unmasks the ennui that others may feel about flowers; they're all around us (at least in the summer in these parts) and yet we often don't even "see" them. They're like prints or paintings that have hung in the same place on the same wall in our homes for years and never been moved, so they "disappear" into our  environment.

Part of the reason for that disappearance, I believe, is that flowers grow on plants. The stems, the leaves and the mass of greenery surrounding the flowers turn them into pointillist daubs of color in a merely "pleasing" overall field of view.

Thus a major purpose of this compendium is to break that cycle of inattention and force the viewer to think again—and look again—at the beauty of the blossoms themselves. My own experience in making these images was that time after time I didn't really see the beauty of the flowers until I enlarged them on the computer screen for processing. And then the details would leap out at me. Later I would go back to the same flower, growing in the gardens where I
photograph, and observe it more closely...which is what I'm hoping the reader will do after perusing the pictures in this volume.

This is not a gardening treatise, and yet I hope it will be of interest to gardeners everywhere. Nor is it strictly a photography exercise or even an art project, for the “artist” here is nature itself (abetted in many cases by wily horticulturists). And it’s not a nature series, for the pictures are unnatural in several respects.

"Mad With Joy" is a work of portraits. In this case, the portraits are all of flowers rather than people. As portraits, the photographs here are not intended as either journalism or a botanical record. Instead, my objective has been to isolate each blossom and present its very best face to the world, just as if the flowers were people who had come to me for their portraits. This means that lighting, color, shading and focus are critical. But I’ve used each of these quite subjectively to present the best picture I could of each flower. Sometimes I found blemishes; I removed them. Sometimes the color wasn’t what I saw with my own eyes; I corrected it. And sometimes a leaf got in the way or a petal was ripped; I moved or replaced them. Then I either deleted the background entirely or darkened it or modified it in any way I could discover that would help my vision of the portrait.

This preamble is the introduction to an extensive manuscript on the topic of flowers and the relationship that people have had with them over the centuries. This work-in-progress may be viewed here. Glenn's book proposal is also available and inquiries are invited.