Flowers / Irises

Flowers are much on my mind these days. Particularly irises.

I’ve been photographing flowers since late May of last year; irises in particular since May 1st of this.

In the past month or so Georgia O’Keefe and Robert Maplethorpe have been on mind. Obviously so. O’Keefe is known for painting large pictures of flowers seen close-up. And Maplethorpe too is known for his images of flowers, these photographic. In both cases, the images are said to be sexualized.

And I believe it. I can see it. That’s why their names have been circulating in my mind.

And what I think is, no, it’s not that, it’s more than that, perhaps less as well. But that’s not right, not now in the early 20th century.

It may have taken an act of imaginative daring to see female genitals in O’Keefe’s flowers; even in Maplethrope’s flowers decades later. But no more. That connection, I note furthermore, is old as the hills. Now it’s banal. All those flowers I’ve been photographing, close-up, at a distance, en masse, they’re all. just. flowers.

The thing is, the blossoms really are reproductive organs, the reproductive organs of plants. And to call some of those plants “flowers” is to reduce those plants to their reproductive organs. They have stems, leaves, and roots as well. And the blossoms, the sex organs, they’re both male and female. So the O’Keefe/Maplethorpe resonance, while scoring on the geometry, gets the biology wrong.

No, best to pay close attention to them, the flowers.

And then we have the irises, which I missed last year. But I was waiting for them this year, just like I did as a child. Waiting for the flowers to bloom in the Spring, and for the irises in particular. They’re so complex in shape, elaborately colored – some of them at least, certainly the ones from my childhood. And tall, relatively speaking. They may well have been my height when I was at the age where I first began noticing them.

Later it was van Gogh’s famous painting. And Japanese art: prints, the famous screen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I suppose these images gave my domestic irises an exotic sheen, as if the blossoms themselves weren’t exotic enough.

Is that it, exotic? Exotic life forms among us. Alien beings.

I love them.

The other day when I was taking photographs, I accidentally broke a stem. I felt sad for that death. The death of a flower. Was it the act of taking photographs day after day that created the connection across which I felt the death of that iris?

Perhaps.

Who knows.

As I recall, John Cage too liked irises.