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Flora Fotografica

Since antiquity, flowers have been deeply appreciated for their myriad forms and colours, their seductive fragrances, their utility in commerce and medicine, their decorative attributes, and their emblematic and symbolic power.

Artists are no exception to this profound attachment. We find flowers everywhere in art, beginning with Paleolithic rock carvings, later with hieroglyphs and mosaics, and later again in paintings, drawings and prints—not to mention their profuse use as decorative motifs in an astonishing variety of materials.

For the past two centuries, flowers have also bloomed in the fields of photography! From the very first flower images by Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins in the 1830s, through Man Ray’s, Karl Blossfeldt’s and Imogen Cunningham’s iconic imagery of the 1930s, to the sensual arrangements by Irving Penn, Duane Michals, Sally Mann and Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1970s and 80s, and to the latest floral studies by well-known contemporaries like Pedro Almodovar, Viviane Sassen, Lee Friedlander, Nick Knight, Ann Mandelbaum, Abelardo Morell and Valérie Belin (to name only a few), magnificent flower photographs are to be found in every period of photographic history, in every movement and in every genre: from documentary and street photography (found flowers), through elaborately arrangedflowers in studio work; from modernism through minimalism, in abstraction and realism, in collage, montage, and a host of experimental approaches. We find flowers in the field of fashion, in portraits and nudes, in landscape practice, and of course in the highly evolved field of botany, but also in conceptual and even political works. Amateur photography also provides a massive field of floral imagery, shared daily by millions via social media.

Flora Fotografica offers a spectacular bouquet of flower imagery drawn from all these sources, taken over the past three decades (1990-2020).

Specifics

Contents:

The artworks range widely in size and in medium: daguerreotypes and cyanotypes (contemporary!), photograms, photomontage and collage, X-Ray and Kirlian imagery, electronic scanning micrography, silver and platinum prints, various kinds of colour prints (some highly idiosyncratic), and works made with diverse experimental processes, including, of course, the aid of the computer.

Publication:

The exhibition is accompanied by a book, which will include some 300 contemporary works and integrate some key 50 historical images (e.g., Man Ray, Karl Blossfeldt, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Mapplethorpe, etc.).

Venue list

Flora Fotografica
The tour will begin in 2023 and continue for several years.
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Contact

FEP
Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography
1650 West End Blvd. Suite 100
St. Louis Park, MN 55416
USA
T+1 612 961 1856
T+33 6 62 01 69 87
Einfo@fep-photo.org
FEP
Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography
57 Rue de la Roquette
75011 Paris
France
T+33 6 62 01 69 87
FEP
Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography
Avenue de la Rasude 2
1006 Lausanne
Switzerland
T+41 21 311 17 47
Einfo@fep-photo.org