I have photographed a lot of people. Directors, growers, colleagues on four continents — it's a large part of what I do on assignment. So the question comes up regularly: if you're that comfortable with people, why is your own work entirely without them?
A person in the frame always wins
Put a human face in a photograph and the viewer looks at nothing else. We are built that way. A face pulls all the attention, and everything the image was also about — light, form, silence — becomes background.
My work asks something slower of a viewer. It only opens up if you keep looking for a while. A face would make that impossible; you'd be finished with the image in a second, because you'd already have decided what it's about.
The subject is the same, though
Here's the thing I only understood years in: I am not photographing flowers. I'm photographing mortality, and a flower happens to be the one subject that lets me do it without anyone having to be brave about it.
A wilting tulip and an ageing body are doing exactly the same thing. But a photograph of a dying person is almost impossible to look at without flinching, and it costs that person something to be seen that way. A flower asks nothing of anyone. It gives me the whole subject — beauty giving way, form holding on a little longer than you'd expect — with none of the intrusion.
The flower is not the subject. It's the safest possible way to look at the subject for longer than a moment.
No permission, no performance
There's a practical side too. A person in front of a camera performs, even when they've agreed not to. Something shifts the instant they know they're being seen — I've spent ten years learning how to work around that, and I'm still working around it.
A flower doesn't know I'm there. It never has a bad day, never asks me to reshoot, never needs to be reassured about how it will look. I can leave it on the table for a week and return whenever the light is right. That freedom is the reason the Wilting series could exist at all — patience like that is simply not available with a human subject.
And the control, honestly
I'd be lying if I left this part out. Photography has always been, for me, a way of framing the world on my own terms — deciding what stays in and what stays out. In assignment work someone else largely makes those choices. In this work, everything within the frame is mine: the flower, the light, the moment, the emptiness around it.
That level of control is unavailable with people, and I don't want it with people. But in a still life it lets me build something quiet and exact, where nothing is there by accident.
Will it stay this way?
I don't know. New work is taking shape that moves away from flowers, and the through-line is the same as it has always been: finding beauty in what isn't conventionally beautiful, and asking whether transience makes a thing more precious rather than less.
Perhaps people will appear in that work one day. If they do, it won't be as portraits. It'll be for the same reason as the flowers — because something is passing, and it's worth looking at properly before it does.