J R’s Dead Flowers
story + photographs by J R Compton

An Index of My Flower Photographs

The Box Series
Ongoing

Box

The Disheveling Daisy Series
September 2011

The First Disheveled Daisy - September 3 2011

Current Series: When I bought five Gerber Daisies at Whole Foods in Lakewood in late August 2011, they already looked a little rough. I usually prefer fresh ones to start — it's nice to have them around and I still enjoy photographing them when they are bright and beautiful. Just they are so much more interesting when they change form. These looked pretty good a couple days, then got wrinkly and way less than a week into it they became fragile, then started falling apart. In my experience, that's just the beginning.

Right now it's on my DallasArtsRevue Supporting Member page, while it's still growing, then when all that's through, and I start a new series on that page, I'll post it to its own page linked here.

 

The Stargazer Series
December 2010

Just Comin' Out   7:30 pm   December 20 2010

I like my daisies, but when Anna gifted me with my first-ever Stargazers, I went as wild with them as they are with color and shape, live, dying, dead and beyond. They're still a little too fancy for my tastes, but fascinating colors.

 

The Tulip Series
December 2010

Looking A Little Thready

Tulips are Anna's favorites, but since they often wither and die within a week of purchase, they're great for my uses, too — if expensive. She bought me these.

 

Other Flowers

Dead Shasta Daisy Fluff   2009  

The ones I shoot sometimes at Joel Cooner Gallery usually aren't dead.
 

Yellow Daisy 2001

I'm sure there's more, because I've been photographing dead flowers for at least a decade. Well before that I did series of dead other things — including cockroaches and animals Dead By The Side of the Road. Somewhere I might even have some of my Stairs, Chairs & Fences series.

 
 

Some common elements

 

I collect boxes, and they are very handy for holding stuff that otherwise might blow away. They are not always natural, but many of my boxes are cigar boxes, so they are made of natural materials. Usually wood. I love wood grain. Just now staring at some earlier examples of cigar boxes of petals and stamen, I suddently realized that what I have by containing my dead flower parts in wood boxes is a frame within a frame, without a frame.

I don't like messing with frames or mats or especially glass. I hate glass on art. Paintings usually don't have them, unless they're hung in a museum. If paintings, which are unique, can hang without glass, why not photographs, which are made from carefully crafted originals?

No reason I can perceive. Recently, I have been getting prints made on Lustre paper, which takes light very well, yet yields a surface that, if some idiot puts its paws on my photograph, does not necessarily ruin the whole thing. The edges of the gatorboard the print is mounted on are black (or mostly black) lending the notion of a three-dimensional object with a shadow. I like that. That dark area separates the mounted print from the usually white wall.

It looks good, self-protects, self-frames

 

Etc..

And having nearly nothing to do with flowers, but flames instead, The Cosmic Cup restaurant on Fire or Cosmic Fire.