bloom

In Bloom I photograph flowers the way I photograph women. Tight, close, in restrained light, until the petal stops reading as a flower and starts reading as surface. The fold. The interior.

Nothing here is sweet. Delicate and sweet are not the same thing.

I stay with them past the opening. What arrives as fullness becomes weight, then collapse, and I keep photographing. A flower runs its whole life in a week. We take decades to do the same thing.

Desire doesn't need a body to be legible. Flowers have never been shy about it.