Thames & Hudson presents the book Flora Photographica by William A. Ewing and Danaé Panchaud. A lavish, colorful volume showcasing masterworks of flower imagery by more than 120 leading photographers .
Flowers have been a source of inspiration for photographers since the medium’s inception, immortalized by such luminaries as Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, and Julia Margaret Cameron. Today, flower photography has come into full bloom once again, with photographers capturing flowers in new, inspiring ways.
Showcasing two hundred vivid, bold, spectacular, and colorful images, Flora Photographica links the very best of flower photography from the past twenty years with its predecessors—canonical floral works from the realms of photography, illustration, and painting that have marked the collective imagination. Images by contemporary photographers, including Cindy Sherman, Valérie Belin, Thomas Ruff, Viviane Sassen, and Martin Schoeller, among many others, appear in nine thematic chapters, alongside two in-depth essays by curators William Ewing and Danaé Panchaud that explore the relationship between contemporary works and the rich traditions of floral art and photography.
“Flower photographs are to be found in every period of photographic history, in every movement and in every genre,” Ewing and Panchaud write in the introduction to Flora Photographica. “They appear with regularity in a wide range of documentary work. Street photographers note flowers in the most unlikely urban environments [and] even the unlikely fields of industrial photography and war photography occasionally offer up notable floral images… We look to the studio tradition for the mainstay of floral imagery [but] flowers have also abounded in the genres of the portrait and the nude, and have long been staples in commercial photography.”
Vibrant and abundant with myriad species of flora, this stunning book is both a celebration of beauty and a study of form, making it a must-have publication for lovers of flowers and photography alike.
About the Authors
William A. Ewing is an author, lecturer, and curator of photography and former director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. His many publications on photography include The Body, Landmark: The Fields of Landscape Photography, Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements, William Wegman: Being Human, and Civilization. He is an Officer in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and a winner of the Royal Photographic Society’s Award for Outstanding Service to Photography.
Danaé Panchaud is a curator and lecturer specializing in photography. She has held positions at several Swiss institutions in the fields of contemporary art, design and science, and was the director of the Photoforum Pasquart in Biel, one of the leading Swiss institutions for contemporary photography, 2018-2021. She was appointed director of the Centre de la photographie Genève in 2021.
William A. Ewing and Danaé Panchaud : Flora Photographica
Thames & Hudson
hardcover
272 pages
200 illustrations
ISBN: 9780500024584
$65.00
https://thamesandhudson.com/
