In her book Wanderland, Jini Reddy asks what it is with people who cannot walk past a pretty flower without wanting to photograph it. I found it an unkind observation, but that’s because I am one of those people.
The thing is: there could be any number of reasons why someone rips out a phone to capture every pretty thing. Perhaps they are artists and this is their medium, or their raw material. Perhaps they are students and want to know why this flower is here and what are its uses and what folklore attaches, none of which can be done without accurate identification. It might be a stepping-stone to understanding the landscape in which it sits and the history, the disturbance and the restoration. Maybe it is as simple as wanting a pretty picture to illustrate a poem or a blog or a tweet or a wall.
Maybe it is the prompt for a poem, or the place-holder for an idea of one, a reminder of a fragmentary text that skipped through the mind, trying to escape.
Maybe it is all of this and more.
For me, it is all this and more.
Firstly, it is a technical thing: can I, untrained and unknowing as I am, capture this lovely thing in a way that its loveliness survives well enough to be shared. Then, I think it is about perfection, and about transience. Every flower is a perfect flower or an imperfect one, but beautiful in its own way. Every flower is unique. Yet every flower is also a dozen different flowers, or a hundred or more. Every set of eyes that gaze upon it, feasting or skimming, drinking it in or barely noticing it’s there, will see a different flower.
Do they see how one petal gleams subtly more than the others? Do they notice the tiny filaments at its heart, the hairs on its leaves? Do they see it alone, a singular thing, or in the company of its fellows, or of bees? Do they notice it as they would a parked car or a billboard on a city street, there but not-there? Or are they arrested by it, needing to stop, needing to look, trying to understand? Do they see it as an abstract shape or a living thing or a fragment of greater living being or the backdrop to the lives of insects that come to feed? Do they see flower or food or herb or medicine or poison? Maybe the flower is merely the flag for the root?
Every flower is a small thing that carries so much weight upon its fragility.
And there is more…
Every flower is not only different to every person who looks, but also to each of us every time we look. Even in my garden I never see the same flower twice. It changes from day to day, and so do I.
I started to photograph the details in my garden as a way to force me to look, and as I looked I saw more often just how suddenly things come and go. One morning I woke up to sunflowers. Another time, the first of the poppies. White Campion moved in…and when they were trampled I cut their stalks and brought the flowers indoors. Oh, the sweet scent of them in my kitchen in the middle of the night! Some things died back and came again. Others gave up the ghost forever. Some resolute souls bloomed all through the winter. All of them teaching me: watch and wait and capture what you can because it may not come again.
When we photograph a flower, it is not a flower we are trying to capture. It is a moment. It is this flower, as I see it, right this second.
It is a breath, a heartbeat, a fragile and temporary thing, that will be gone and will not come again. Not like this one. It is a futile attempt to capture time. To trap a sunbeam in a buttercup, or cloud-dust in a daisy, a poignant memory in a poppy, fragments of sky fallen into bluebells. To see the detail in cow parsley to atone for all the years it was thought a weed. Forget-me-nots for a funeral. Cornflowers for a lost summer’s day. Roses for the ever-unfolding nature of our future. Iris for the dawn, and for river banks and dragonflies. Lilies for languidness, and heather for the hills.
What it is with people who cannot pass a glory without reaching for a camera, is that we feel the inadequacy of our memory, and of our pen. We take photographs because we fear we will not find the words. We take pictures because we’re not good enough poets.
