Flowers II

The flowers in this series have amassed over numerous years. Some are single flowers or bouquets people have brought me. Flowers as a gift to my wife or from her to me. Flowers that have blossomed for me, that I felt it was a shame simply to throw away.

As a photographer I have always taken a particular interest in faces. Faces of animals and people. For me, dry flowers are similar to the faces of old people. It is only once they are wilting that flowers reach their true beauty and independence because they have already had a full life behind them – in contrast to all those invariably freshly blossoming tulips, roses, sunflowers.

I shot a lot of my series of old flowers on old Agfa, Kodak and Perutz stock dating back to the period between the 1940s to the 1960s. I will enlarge some of them on old roll paper I still have stored in the basement. After all, I am an old photographer with old cameras. So in this sense this series is an homage to ageing.